Next, dismissing all the servants, the younger one of the three, Marco Polo, went to an inner chamber and brought forth to the table the coarse and shabby dresses in which the three had arrived in Venice. Then, taking sharp knives, the travellers ripped open the seams and welts of the garments, and shook from them a vast profusion of diamonds, rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, emeralds, and other precious stones. The guests were dumfounded and amazed. "And now," says Ramusio, "they recognized that in spite of all former doubts, these were in truth those honored and worthy gentlemen of the Casa Polo that they claimed to be; and so all paid them the greatest honor and reverence." Furthermore, we are told that when the story got wind in Venice, straightway the whole city, gentle and simple, flocked to the house to embrace the three travellers, and to make much of them with every conceivable demonstration of affection and respect.
This was the wonderful home-coming of the three Polos, who for twenty-four years had been wandering in the East, and who, when they set out on their homeward journey, a journey beset with untold difficulties and dangers, took the precaution to conceal in their garments, as above told, the wealth which they had accumulated while they were at the court of the Great Khan of Tartary. It reads like a romance, a story out of "The Arabian Nights' Entertainments." But it is all true, and the archives of Venice corroborate pretty nearly all the details herein set forth. Indeed, as a prophet is not without honor save in his own country and among his own kindred, it must be said that the later generation of Venetians found less difficulty in believing the tales of the three travellers than did those who first heard them. In telling these tales, they had frequent occasion to use the word "millions," a word not then common among the Venetians, as to say that the Great Khan had revenues amounting to ten or fifteen millions of gold, and so on. And the people gave Marco, who seems to have been the story-teller of the party, the nickname of Messer Marco Millioni. Curiously enough, this name appears in the public records of old Venice.
Of the final exit of the elders of the Polo family, Nicolo and Maffeo, we have no trustworthy account. As they were well stricken in years when they returned from their long sojourn in Cathay, we may suppose that they did not live long after their return to Venice. But the younger Marco had a busy and stirring life. At that time the republics of Venice and Genoa were rivals for the ruling of the seas and the monopoly of maritime trade everywhere. A Venetian galley could not meet one from Genoa without a fight, and the fleets of the two states were continually at war.
Marco, being one of the representatives of the noble Venetian families who were required to come to the support of the state with at least one galley, entered the naval service of Venice in command of a war galley, and was engaged in the great battle between Venice and Genoa near Curzola, off the Dalmatian coast, in 1298, three years after his return from Cathay. The Venetians were beaten ignominiously, and 7,000 of them were taken prisoners and carried to Genoa. It was a lucky thing for the world that Marco Polo was thus put into enforced idleness, and that he had for a companion in confinement an educated gentleman, one Rusticiano, of Pisa. Otherwise, most likely we never would have heard of the travels of Marco Polo, whom some of the later chroniclers have likened to Columbus, the discoverer of America.
To beguile the tedium of their imprisonment, Marco was wont to tell his traveller's tales to his companion, Rusticiano, and this worthy gentleman conceived the notion of writing out the marvellous adventures and observations of his fellow-prisoner. We must bear in mind that the Italian gentry of that time did not hold in high esteem the art of writing, and although Marco was not inferior to any man in daring or adventurousness, he was willing to leave to the scriveners the task of writing about such matters. But, in the end, the advice of Rusticiano prevailed, and the Pisan gentleman set down from the dictation of Marco "The Book of Ser Marco Polo Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East." This was, up to that time, the most important book of travels and voyages ever written. Indeed, it was the most important book of any kind written during the Middle Ages.
The book contributed more new facts toward a knowledge of the earth's surface, says one skilled authority, than any book that had been written before. The writer was the first to describe China, or Cathay, in its vastness of territory, its wonderfully rich and populous cities, and the first to tell of Tartary, Thibet, Burmah, Siam, Cochin-China, the Indian Archipelago, the Andaman Islands, of Java and Sumatra, of the fabled island of Cipangu, or Japan, of Hindustan, and that marvellous region which the world learned to know as Farther India. From far-voyaging sailors he brought home accounts of Zanzibar and Madagascar, and the semi-Christian country of Abyssinia, where some accounts located that mysterious potentate called Prester John. He had traversed Persia and had picked up a vast amount of information concerning the country of Siberia, with its polar snows and bears, its dog-sledges, and its almost everlasting winter. He traversed the entire length of Asia.
Surely, Europe might well be dazed when this account of regions, until then unknown, was unrolled before the scholars and explorers who could read the few precious books then in circulation. For it should be remembered that the art of printing was then unknown, and only in manuscript did any book make its appearance. Rusticiano wrote in a very poor sort of French; for then, as now, that language was commonest in all the cities of Europe. How much of the language of the book of Marco Polo's travels was Marco's, and how much was the worthy Rusticiano's, we are unable to decide. The facts in that famous book were duly vouched for by Marco. The opening chapter, or prologue, inflated and wordy, after the fashion of the times, was undoubtedly Rusticiano's. He began thus: "Great Princes, Emperors, and Kings, Dukes and Marquises, Counts, Knights, and Burgesses! and People of all degree who desire to get knowledge of the various races of mankind and of the diversities of the sundry regions of the World, take this Book and cause it to be read to you. For ye shall find therein all kinds of wonderful things, and the divers histories of the Great Hermenia, and of Persia, and of the Land of the Tartars, and of India, and of many another country of which our Book doth speak, particularly and in regular succession, according to the description of Messer Marco Polo, a wise and noble citizen of Venice, as he saw them with his own eyes."
This portentous prologue ends with these great swelling words: "And I may tell you that in acquiring this knowledge he spent in those various parts of the World good six-and-twenty years. Now, being thereafter an inmate of the Prison at Genoa, he caused Messer Rusticiano, of Pisa, who was in the same Prison likewise, to reduce the whole to writing; and this befell in the year 1298 from the birth of Jesus."
One year later, in the summer of 1299, Marco Polo was set at liberty and returned to Venice, where he died peacefully in 1324. His last will and testament, dated January 9, 1323, is preserved among the archives of Venice, and a marble statue in his honor was set up by the Venetians, in the seventeenth century, and may be seen unto this day in the Palazzo Morosini-Gattemburg, in the Campo S. Stefano of that city.
How came Marco Polo to be drawn so far into the vague and shadowy East? Somewhere about the middle of the thirteenth century, certain members of the Polo family had established a trading-house in Constantinople, then pretty near the end of the world from Europe. These adventurous Venetians, in 1260, sent the two brothers, Nicolo and Maffeo, still further to the eastward on a trading journey to the Crimea. Led on by one adventure and another, and lured by the hope of new and greater gains, they ascended the Volga northward and eastward, crossed Bokhara, and finally broke into one of the northwestern provinces of China, or Cathay, then faintly known in Europe by various names, the most classic of which was Seres.