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Marco Polo and His ‘Travels’1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Peter Jackson
Peter Jackson
Affiliation:
Keele University
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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
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 61 , Issue 1 , February 1998 , pp. 82 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1998

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References

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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.

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88 Jean Aubin, ‘Les princes d‘Ormuz du XIIIe au XVe siècle’, Journal Asiatique, CCXLI, 1953, 88Google Scholar.

89 See generally Fairbank, John K. (ed.), The Chinese world order (Cambridge, Mass., 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the attitudes of the Mongols' predecessors, the Sung emperors, see Herbert Franke, ‘Sung embassies: some general observations’, in Rossabi, Morris (ed.), China among equals: the Middle Kingdom and its neighbours, 10th–14th centuries (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983), 117Google Scholar; for the post-Yüan era, Henry Serruys, C.I.C.M., Sino-Mongol relations during the Ming, II: The tribute system and diplomatic missions (1400–1600) (Mélanges Chinois et Bouddhiques, XIV, Brussels, 1967), 19–21.

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.

91 Denis Sinor, ‘Diplomatic practices in medieval Inner Asia’, in Bosworth, C. E. etal. (ed.), The Islamic world from Classical to modern times: Essays in honor of Bernard Lewis (Princeton, 1989), 342–3Google Scholar

92 Critchley, 38–41, suggests that Marco Polo was inflating his own capacities in a bid to secure a job with the French.

93 Texts conveniently assembled in Moule, A. C., Quinsai and other notes on Marco Polo (Cambridge, 1957), 75–6Google Scholar.

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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99 Rubruck, ‘Itinerarium‘, xxix, 7–13, in Van den Wyngaert, 253–6; (tr.)Jackson, Peter and Morgan, David, The mission of Friar William of Rubruck (Hakluyt Society, 2nd series, 173,London, 1990), 184–7Google Scholar

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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.).