Just as printing began, the humanist Giambattista Ramusio edited and translated his collection of Marco Polo manuscripts into a unified Italian book. It was Ramusio who declared the accomplishments of his fellow Venetian to be the greatest the world had ever seen. Once Ramusio’s edition became a printed book, The Book of Marco Polo became the most well-known record of its time. Of all the descriptions of Asia before ocean-crossing ships brought Europeans to every part of the planet, only Marco Polo’s description of the world has been popular from the time it was first written to the present day.

Many well-known books are not well understood. I was in a bookstore one day, looking for a book to read, and chose the Penguin paperback edition of The Travels of Marco Polo. I thought it was finally time to read the book itself. Once I read it, I became fascinated by the layers of transmission that brought it to my attention. I have become a devotee of Marco Polo’s book, the imagination of the book’s nineteenth- and twentieth- century illustrators, and the books written about The Book. Of all the recent examples of books about The Book – and there are many recent examples – John Larner’s Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (1999) is the best. It is the work of a man who reads many languages and constructs arguments by entertaining all sides of a disagreement with taste and candor. He provides the most convincing explanation of where the Venetian and his collaborator came from and the European world that received and popularized their book.

The reader is to understand that the recording of these stories, like the rest of the Polos’ adventures, is an opportunity born from adversity.

Larner explains a wide range of misconceptions about the author and the book. Polo has been called an exaggerator, a liar, a proto-colonialist, a wise man, a complete fabrication, a hero of the Venetian Republic, and a great explorer. The Book has been described as a romance tale, a geography of the world, a record of extraordinary travels, and a manual for fellow merchants hoping to enter the silk and spice trade. Larner enumerates all these descriptions and then explains how none are entirely correct.

After reading Larner’s book, I felt that I had finally understood why The Book was written. In the Prologue, the writer — Messer Rustichello of Pisa — states that he has written a book from the stories that Messer Marco Polo of Venice has provided him. Both men have the time to create this book because they are prisoners in Genoa. The reader is to understand that the recording of these stories, like the rest of the Polos’ adventures, is an opportunity born from adversity. Rustichello also reports that Marco Polo feels it a pity if he did not record his experiences for others to learn of the world he has seen.

Then Rustichello writes about what Marco Polo has seen. His Franco-Italian language is filled with repetitions of clichés. Before becoming a prisoner in Genoa, Rustichello had written the Méliadus, a collection of stories about King Arthur. Larner points out that entire passages from this earlier work reappear word for word in The Book of Marco Polo. One of these plagiarized sections — if copying from your own work can be called plagiarism — is the arrival of the Polos at the court of Kublai. The language in this passage is identical to Rustichello’s description of “the reception of Tristan at the court of Camelot” in his earlier work. Anyone who finds in these sentences proof of how well young Marco was received is mistaking figures of speech for eye-witness account.