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Marco Polo and His ‘Travels’1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Peter Jackson
Affiliation:
Keele University

Extract

The year 1998 marks the seven-hundredth anniversary of the initial composition of the book associated with Marco Polo, Le devisament dou monde. As the first European to claim that he had been to China and back (not to mention that he had travelled extensively elsewhere in Asia), Polo has become a household name. He has been credited with the introduction of noodles into Italy and of spaghetti into China. With perhaps greater warrant, he has been cited as an authority onȔinter aliaȔthe capital of the Mongol Great Khan Qubilai, on the Mongol postal relay system, on the trade in horses across the Arabian Sea, and on political conditions on the north-west frontier of India in the mid thirteenth century. The Marco Polo bibliography published in 1986 contained over 2,300 items in European languages alone.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1998

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References

2 Watanabe, Hiroshi (comp.), Marco Polo bibliography 1477–1983 (Tokyo, 1986).Google Scholar

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22 MP, I, 31–2, 34–5. It is improbable, incidentally, that Polo was captured in the battle off Ayas in 1296; a minor sea engagement, at a slightly later date, has been proposed.

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26 MP, I, 28, 556 (and cf. 555, n.l).

27 Critchley, 21. This detail is not found in Jacopo d'Acqui, as Wood claims (pp. 42, 142).

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66 Pelliot, Notes, I, 68. Cleaves, Francis Woodman, ‘The biography of Bayan of the Bārin in the Yüan Shih’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, XIX, 1956, 186–8Google Scholar. Polo (or perhaps Rusticello) transferred to Bayan's Chinese rank an incorrect explanation of the Mongol name bayan (‘rich’) as deriving from Chinese po-yen, ‘hundred eyes’.

67 Sinor, ‘Interpreters’, 307–16.

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81 Burkhard Roberg, ‘Die Tartaren auf dem 2. Konzil von Lyon (1274)’, Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, v (1973), 288, n. 268, suggests that Gregory wrote to the Īl-khān Abaqa, at least, from the Holy Land prior to his departure for Italy, in order to notify him of his plans to convene the council.

82 SeeRichard, Jean, La papauté et les missions d'Orient au Moyen-Âge (XIIe–XVe siècles) (Rome, 1977), 85–6Google Scholar. Salimbene, ‘Cronica’, 210, who names the papal envoys, says in error that they were sent by John XXI.

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87 Francīs Woodman Cleaves, ‘A Chinese source bearing on Marco Polo's departure from China and a Persian source on his arrival in Persia’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, XXXVI, 1976, 181203Google Scholar. Rashīd al-Dīn, Jāmi' al-Tawārīkh, ed. A. A. Alizade and tr. A. K. Arends, m (Baku, 1957), text 280 (and see 281), gives no date for the arrival of the embassy from China, though clearly placing it prior to the winter of 1293–4.

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90 For Qubilai's reign, see Elizabeth Endicott-West, ‘Merchant associations in Yuan China: the Ortoy’, Asia Major, 3rd series, II (1989), part 2, 127–54; for the pre-Qubilai era, Thomas T. Allsen, –Mongolian princes and their merchant partners 1200–1260’, ibid., 83–126.

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94 Pelliot, Notes, II, 876.

95 A point made by Ronald Latham in his introduction to the Penguin translation (1958), 14, n. These passages, however, do appear in abbreviated form in the Tuscan version (Ruggieri, 230–1).

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102 Richard, ‘Isol le Pisan’, 188’90. For Ghazan's brief reoccupation of Syrīa and Palestine, see Sylvia Schein, ‘Gesta Dei per Mongolos 1300: the genesis of a non-event’, English Historical Review, XCIV, 1979, 805’19 (especially 815 ff.).