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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

De si grande scacho mato

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. defeat of Pisa was overwhelming.

But on this occasion the 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).

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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 :

"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 romances . . . . . 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.†

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).

it would seem, by various Anglo-French gentlemen at the court of Henry III., styled, or styling themselves, Gasses le Blunt, Luces de Gast, Robert de Borron, and Helye de Borron. And these abridgments or recasts are professedly the work of Le Maistre Rusticien de Pise. Several of them were printed at Paris in the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries as the works of Rusticien de Pise; and as the preambles and the like, especially in the form presented in those printed editions, appear to be due sometimes to the original composers (as Robert and Helye de Borron) and sometimes to Rusticien de Pise the recaster, there would seem to have been a good deal of confusion made in regard to their respective personalities.

From a preamble to one of those compilations which undoubtedly belongs to Rustician, and which we shall quote at length by and bye, we learn that Master Rustician “translated" (or perhaps transferred?) his compilation from a book belonging to King Edward of England, at the time when that prince went beyond seas to recover the Holy Sepulchre. Now Prince Edward started for the Holy Land in 1270, spent the winter of that year in Sicily, and arrived in Palestine in May 1271. He quitted it again in August 1272, and passed again by Sicily, where in January 1273 he heard of his father's death and his own consequent accession. M. Paulin-Paris supposes that Rustician was attached to the Sicilian Court of Charles of Anjou, and that Edward "may have deposited with that king the Romances of the Round Table, of which all the world was talking, but the manuscripts of which were still very rare, especially those of the work of Helye de Borron

whether by order, or only with permission of the King of Sicily, our Rustician made haste to read, abridge, and re-arrange the whole, and when Edward returned to Sicily he recovered possession of the book from which the indefatigable Pisan had extracted the contents."

But this I believe is, in so far as it passes the facts stated in Rustician's own preamble, pure hypothesis, for nothing is cited that connects Rustician with the King of Sicily. And if there be not some such confusion of personality as we have alluded to, in another of the preambles, which is quoted by

Giron le Courtois, and the conclusion of Tristan.

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