On Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World

I lied in my review of Leaves of Grass when I said nobody has every loved anybody as much as Walt Whitman loves Walt Whitman. The exception is here—John Larner absolutely adores Marco Polo and this book exudes excitement toward his subject.

From what I’ve gathered here, “Marco Polo Studies” seems to be a bit of an arcane field of study that has committed scholars who dive so deep into Polo’s text as to be impenetrable to outside audiences. Fortunate for us, Larner offers a sort of introduction to what we might call “Polo Studies.” Larner begins the book by telling us about the bulk of academics on Marco Polo, who tend to argue that learned 14th and 15th century scholars did not take Marco Polo seriously—with a caveat: literate people who were not well educated took him very seriously (something that reminds me of Menocchio in The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller). This isn’t to say that all scholars believed that Marco Polo was making it up—although some did—but they didn’t find much that was useful in the text. The general consensus is that Marco Polo’s book is broadly true, it was written in prison, and that it was edited (or, embellished) by a fellow prisoner. As a result, it’s almost certainly not true that Marco Polo was sent as an emissary by Kublai Khan to India, just as it is almost surely not true that Ibn Battuta became a qadi for the Sultan of Delhi, but much of what remains has some degree of accuracy.

After the publication of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, European interest in Marco Polo’s narrative declined precipitously, although it did remain in the minds of some and was occasionally consulted by geographers and humanists. By the 18th century, Marco Polo’s work had become little more than a curiosity.

I was most interested in Larner’s coverage of Marco Polo’s attitudes toward Muslims. While, as a thirteenth-century Venetian, Polo did seem to have a nearly reflexive hostility towards them, he was also willing to grant them credit as a “civilizing” force in much of Asia (especially Southeast Asia). In these sections, I was amused to see that other European translators and editors would often try to mask Polo’s attitudes by adding negative adjectives to accompany nouns. For instance, “Muhammad” became “abominable Muhammad.” I was also very interested in Larner’s treatment of Marco Polo’s reception in Europe, something I had read a little bit about in Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas but didn’t know more about.

This is a great introduction to “Marco Polo Studies” for an academically-oriented non-specialist, although it may be much more difficult for those not accustomed to scholarly texts.