There is however another piece of evidence, though it is curiously indirect. The Dominican Friar Jacopo of Acqui was a contemporary of Polo's, and was the author of a somewhat obscure Chronicle called Imago Mundi.* Now this Chronicle does contain mention of Marco's capture in action by the Genoese, but attributes it to a different action from Curzola, and one fought at a time when Polo could not have been present. The passage runs as follows in a manuscript of the Ambrosian Library, according to an extract given by Baldelli Boni :- "In the year of Christ MCCLXXXXVI, in the time of Pope Boniface VI., of whom we have spoken above, a battle was fought in Arminia, at the place called Layaz, between xv. galleys of Genoese merchants and xxv. of Venetian merchants; and after a great fight the galleys of the Venetians were beaten, and (the crews) all slain or taken; and among them was taken Messer Marco the Venetian, who was in company with those merchants, and who was called Milono, which is as much as to say 'a thousand thousand pounds,' for so goes the phrase in Venice. So this Messer Marco Milono the Venetian, with the other Venetian prisoners, is carried off to the prison of Genoa, and there kept for a long time. This Messer Marco was a long time with his father and uncle in Tartary, and he there saw many things, and made much wealth, and also learned many things, for he was a man of ability. And so, being in prison at Genoa, he made a Book concerning the great wonders of the World, i.e., concerning such of them as he had seen. And what he told in the Book was not as much as he had really seen, because of the tongues of detractors, who, being ready to impose their own lies on others, are over hasty to set down as lies what they in their perversity disbelieve, or do not understand. And because there are many great and strange things in that Book, which are reckoned past all credence, he was asked by his friends on his deathbed to correct the Book by removing everything that went beyond the facts. To which his reply was that he had not told one-half of what he had really seen! "† This statement regarding the capture of Marco at the Battle of Ayas is one which cannot be true, for we know that he did not reach Venice till 1295, travelling from Persia by Though there is no precise information as to the birth or death of this writer, who belonged to a noble family of Lombardy, the Bellingeri, he can be traced with tolerable certainty as in life in 1289, 1320, and 1334 (see the Introduction to his Chronicle in the Turin Monumenta, Scriptores III.). There is another MS. of the Imago Mundi at Turin, which has been printed in the Monumenta. The passage about Polo in that copy differs widely in wording, is much shorter, and contains no date. But it relates his capture as having taken place at La Glaza, which I think there can be no doubt is also intended for Ayas (sometimes called Giazza), a place which in fact is called Glaza in three of the MSS. of which various readings are given in the edition of the Société de Géographie (p. 535). way of Trebizond and the Bosphorus, whilst the Battle of Ayas, of which we have purposely given some detail, was fought in May, 1294. The date MCCLXXXXVI assigned to it in the preceding extract has given rise to some unprofitable discussion. Could that date be accepted, no doubt it would enable us also to accept this, the sole statement from the Traveller's own age of the circumstances which brought him into a Genoese prison; it would enable us to place that imprisonment within a few months of his return from the East, and to extend its duration to three years, points which would thus accord better with the general tenor of Ramusio's tradition than the capture of Curzola. But the matter is not open to such a solution. The date of the Battle of Ayas is not more doubtful than that of the Battle of the Nile. It is clearly stated by several independent chroniclers, and is carefully established in the Ballad that we have quoted above.* We shall see repeatedly in the course of this Book how uncertain are the transcriptions of dates in Roman numerals, and in the present case the LXXXXVI is as certainly a mistake for LXXXXIV. as is Boniface VI. in the same quotation a mistake for Boniface VIII. But though we cannot accept the statement that Polo was taken prisoner at Ayas, in the spring of 1294, we may accept the passage as evidence from a contemporary source that he was taken prisoner in some sea-fight with the Genoese, and thus admit it in corroboration of the Ramusian Tradition of his capture in a sea-fight at Curzola in 1298, which is perfectly consistent with all other facts in our possession. VII. RUSTICIANO OR RUSTICHELLO OF PISA, MARCO POLO'S FELLOWPRISONER AT GENOA, THE SCRIBE WHO WROTE DOWN THE TRAVELS. 38. We have now.to say something of that Rusticiano to whom all who value Polo's book are so much indebted. "E per meio esse aregordenti Correa mille duxenti Zonto ge novanta e quatro.” The Armenian Prince Hayton or Héthum has put it under 1293 (see Langlois, Mém. sur les Relations de Gênes avec la Petite-Armenie). Rusticiano, perhaps a The relations between Genoa and Pisa had long been so hostile that it was only too natural in 1298 to find a Pisan in the gaol of Genoa. An unhappy multitude of such prisoner from prisoners had been carried thither fourteen years Meloria. before, and the survivors still lingered there in vastly dwindled numbers. In the summer of 1284 was fought the battle from which Pisa had to date the commencement of her long decay. In July of that year the Pisans, at a time when the Genoese had no fleet in their own immediate waters, had advanced to the very port of Genoa and shot their defiance into the proud city in the form of silver-headed arrows, and stones belted with scarlet. They had to pay dearly for this insult. The Genoese, recalling their cruisers, speedily mustered a fleet of eighty-eight galleys, which were placed under the command of another of that illustrious House of Doria, the Scipios of Genoa as they have been called, Uberto, the elder brother of Lamba. Lamba himself with his six sons, and another brother, was in the fleet, whilst the whole number of Dorias who fought in the ensuing action amounted to 250, most of them on board one great galley bearing the name of the family patron, St. Matthew.† The Pisans, more than one-fourth inferior in strength, came out boldly, and the battle was fought off the Porto Pisano, in fact close in front of Leghorn, where a lighthouse on a remarkable arched basement still marks the islet of MELORIA, whence the battle got its name. The day was the 6th of August, the feast of St. Sixtus, a day memorable in the Pisan Fasti for several great victories. But on this occasion the defeat of Pisa was overwhelming. Forty of their galleys were B. Marangone, Croniche della C. di Pisa, in Rerum Ital. Script. of Tartini, Florence, 1748, i. 563; Dal Borgo, Dissert. sopra l'Istoria Pisana, ii. 287. + The list of the whole number is preserved in the Doria archives, and has been published by Sign. Jacopo Doria. Many of the baptismal names are curious, and show how far sponsors wandered from the Church Calendar. Assan, Aiton, Turco, Soldan seem to come of the constant interest in the East. Alaone, a name which remained in the family for several generations, I had thought certainly borrowed from the fierce conqueror of the Khalif (infra, p. 65). But as one Alaone, present at this battle, had a son also there, he must surely have been christened before the fame of Hulaku could have reached Genoa (see La chiesa di S. Matteo, pp. 250, seqq.). In documents of the kingdom of Jerusalem there are names still more anomalous, e. g., Gualterius Baffumeth, Joannes Mahomet (see Cod. Dipl. del Sac. Milit. Ord. Gerosol. I. 2-3, 62). taken or sunk, and upwards of 9000 prisoners carried to Genoa. In fact so vast a sweep was made of the flower of Pisan manhood that it was a common saying then: "Che vuol veder Pisa, vada a Genova !" Many noble ladies of Pisa went in large companies on foot to Genoa to seek their husbands or kinsmen: "And when they made enquiry of the Keepers of the Prisons the reply would be, 'Yesterday there died thirty of them, to-day there have died forty; all of whom we have cast into the sea; and so it is daily.' A body of prisoners so numerous and important naturally exerted themselves in the cause of peace, and through their efforts, after many months of negotiation, a formal peace was signed (15th April, 1288). Pisan Prisoners of Meloria, and would gather from them dismal forebodings of the fate before them. It is a fair conjecture that to that remnant Rusticiano of Pisa may have belonged. We have seen Ramusio's representation of the kindness shown to Marco during his imprisonment by a certain Genoese *Memorial. Potestat. Regiens. in Muratori, viii. 1162. † See Fragm. Hist. Pisan. in Muratori, xxiv. 651, seqq.; and Caffaro, id. vi. 588, 594-5. The cut in the text represents a striking memorial of those Pisan Prisoners, which perhaps still survives, but which at any rate existed last century in a collection at Lucca. It is the seal of the prisoners as a body corporate : SIGILLUM UNIVERSITATIS CARCERATORUM PISANORUM JANUE DETENTORUM, and was doubtless used in their negotiations for peace with the Genoese Commissioners. It represents two of the prisoners imploring the Madonna, Patron of the Duomo at Pisa. It is from Manni, Osserv. Stor. sopra Sigilli Antichi, &c., Firenze, 1739, tom. xii. The seal is also engraved in Dal Borgo, op. cit. ii. 316. gentleman, who also assisted him to reduce his travels to writing. We may be certain that this Genoese gentleman is only a distorted image of Rusticiano, the Pisan prisoner in the gaol of Genoa, whose name and part in the history of his hero's book Ramusio so strangely ignores. Yet patriotic Genoese writers in our own times have striven to determine the identity of this their imaginary countryman!* 39. Who, then, was Rusticiano, or, as the name actually is read in the oldest type of MS., "Messire Rustacians de Rusticiano, Pise"? a person known from other sources. Our knowledge of him is but scanty. Still something is known of him besides the few words concluding his preamble to our Traveller's Book, which you may read at p. 1-2 of the body of this volume. In Sir Walter Scott's "Essay on Romance," when he speaks of the new mould in which the subjects of the old metrical stories were cast by the school of prose romancers which arose in the 13th century, we find the following words :— romances "Whatever fragments or shadows of true history may yet remain hidden under the mass of accumulated fable which had been heaped upon them during successive ages, must undoubtedly be sought in the metrical But those prose authors who wrote under the imaginary names of RUSTICIEN DE PISE, Robert de Borron, and the like, usually seized upon the subject of some old minstrel; and recomposing the whole narrative after their own fashion, with additional character and adventure, totally obliterated in that operation any shades which remained of the original and probably authentic tradition," &c.t Evidently, therefore, Sir Walter regarded Rustician of Pisa as a person belonging to the same ghostly company as his own Cleishbothams and Dryasdusts. But in this we see that he was wrong. In the great Paris Library and elsewhere there are manuscript volumes containing the stories of the Round Table abridged and somewhat clumsily combined from the various Prose Romances of that cycle, such as Sir Tristan, Lancelot, Palamedes, Giron le Courtois, &c., which had been composed, The Abate Spotorno in his Storia Letteraria della Liguria, II. 219, fixes on a Genoese philosopher called Andalo del Negro, mentioned by Boccaccio. I quote from Galignani's ed. of Prose Works, v. 712. This has "Rusticien de Puise." In this view of the fictitious character of the names of Rusticien and the rest, Sir Walter seems to have been following Ritson, as I gather from a quotation in Dunlop's H. of Fiction (Liebrecht's German version, p. 63). |