The reader can see a man standing on a stage before an assembled court, a powerful guild or town council, waving his hand back and forth as he recounts the stories. Each rhetorical “what more can I say?” leads to the next “Let me tell you about these marvels: forms of money used – the quantities of silk produced – number of ships in their harbors – the number of troops stationed at each gate.” And after each enumeration the story continues onward to the next part of the world, “On leaving Kinsai the travelers proceeds southwest for a day’s journey, through a country filled with delightful mansions, villages and gardens” and so on and so on.

Once we pass the Prologue, it is difficult to distinguish the writer and the teller. The “we”, “he” or “I” of the voice shifts frequently. Neither the writer nor the teller is what we would now call an ethnographer. Rustichello shapes the stories that he writes, but he rarely comments on them. Marco Polo notices the beliefs and practices around him, but he is not very interested in precisely who believes what. He identifies the subjects of the Great Khan by terms that mix religious practices and regionalism: Saracens, idolaters, sorcerers, Cathayans, Manzians, Nestorian Christians. If we imagine that all medieval Europeans saw the world in terms of Us and Them, we see that Marco Polo is rather open-minded. He recognizes a world filled with many Thems, none of which are exactly like Us, even those who identified themselves as Christians.

Despite his reputation, Marco Polo was not an explorer. An explorer sets out to find a previously unknown place. Marco Polo tells us about places that are already known. He reports very little about the journey or journeys that gave him this knowledge. The locations in the story move the reader-listener from place to place, but we rarely have any news of how he traveled or what he did when he visited a specific place. We learn almost nothing about Marco Polo as a person. His description of the world contains no stories of personal conflict, romantic attachments, spiritual confrontations or personal exploits. The few exceptions to this – his claim that he served as governor of a Chinese city; that he, his father and uncle were responsible for creating the war machines for the Mongol victory over an important Chinese fortress – are among the details that are arguably false. The Chinese sources do not mention his name among the governors of the period. Other sources mention foreign engineers building the war machines during the battle he refers to, but these same sources make it clear that the battle occurred at a time before the Polos arrived in Cathay. I imagine these assertions of personal importance as moments in the collaboration when the writer’s desire to impress his audience overcame the teller’s reticence. “Okay,” I hear Marco saying to Rustacello, “You can say I was governor of that city. Now, let’s get on with it.”

The main message of the book is that Marco Polo, his father and his uncle all worked for the court of Kublai Khan, a king who ruled a vast part of the world. The only description of Marco’s job is in the Prologue:

This story is the key for the rest of the narrative. Our hero tells stories “well and shrewdly” to inform and impress his audience. Whether the anecdote is the truth or not, it is clearly Rustichello’s way of explaining how Marco Polo came to know more of the world than any other man. It is also the framework for building an entertaining description of the world.