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Marco Polo, Rustichello of Pisa - The Travels of Marco Polo, 1
South GATE of the "IMPERIAL CITY" at Peking. From an original sketch belonging to the late Dr.
W. Lockhart.
The BUGUT EAGLE. After Atkinson's Oriental and Western Siberia.
The TENTS of the EMPEROR K'ien-lung. From a drawing in the Staunton Collection in the
British Museum.
Plain of CAMBALUC; the City in the distance; from the hills on the north-west. From a photograph.
Borrowed from Dr. Rennie's Peking.
The Great TEMPLE OF HEAVEN at Peking. From Michie's Siberian Overland Route.
MARBLE ARCHWAY erected under the MONGOL DYNASTY at Kiu-Yong Kwan in the Nan-k'au
Pass, N.W. of Peking. From a photograph in the possession of the present Editor.
MARCO POLO AND HIS BOOK.
INTRODUCTORY NOTICES.
I. OBSCURITIES IN THE HISTORY OF HIS LIFE AND BOOK. RAMUSIO'S STATEMENTS.
[Obscurities of Polo's Book, and personal History.]
1. With all the intrinsic interest of Marco Polo's Book it may perhaps be doubted if it would have
continued to exercise such fascination on many minds through succesive generations were it not for the
difficult questions which it suggests. It is a great book of puzzles, whilst our confidence in the man's
veracity is such that we feel certain every puzzle has a solution.
And such difficulties have not attached merely to the identification of places, the interpretation of
outlandish terms, or the illustration of obscure customs; for strange entanglements have perplexed also
the chief circumstances of the Traveller's life and authorship. The time of the dictation of his Book and of
the execution of his Last Will have been almost the only undisputed epochs in his biography. The year of
his birth has been contested, and the date of his death has not been recorded; the critical occasion of his
capture by the Genoese, to which we seem to owe the happy fact that he did not go down mute to the
tomb of his fathers, has been made the subject of chronological difficulties; there are in the various texts
of his story variations hard to account for; the very tongue in which it was written down has furnished a
question, solved only in our own age, and in a most unexpected manner.
[Ramusio, his earliest biographer. His account of Polo.]
2. The first person who attempted to gather and string the facts of Marco Polo's personal history was his
countryman, the celebrated John Baptist Ramusio. His essay abounds in what we now know to be errors
of detail, but, prepared as it was when traditions of the Traveller were still rife in Venice, a genuine
thread runs through it which could never have been spun in later days, and its presentation seems to me
an essential element in any full discourse upon the subject.
Ramusio's preface to the Book of Marco Polo, which opens the second volume of his famous Collection
of Voyages and Travels, and is addressed to his learned friend Jerome Fracastoro, after referring to some
of the most noted geographers of antiquity, proceeds:[1] -
"Of all that I have named, Ptolemy, as the latest, possessed the
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