Depiction of Wang Khan in “Le Livre des merveilles,” 15th century.
PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

Beneath the facade of medieval romance are the essential historical facts. In The Secret History of the Mongols, the Mongol’s own version of their history written several generations before Marco Polo’s time in Asia, we learn that the Kerait leader Toghrul was given the title Wang (Ung) Khan for his service to the northern Chinese kingdom. Toghrul and the younger Temujin – a Mongol leader later given the title Chinggis (Genghis) Khan – fought together against the Tatar, a tribe responsible for murdering Chinggis Khan’s father. That Toghrul and the rest of the Kerait leadership were Nestorian Christians provides a reasonable justification for associating him with the well-known legend of Prester John. Chinggis Khan pledged his loyalty to the Kerait leader in an arrangement similar to a medieval European knight pledging loyalty to his king. This alliance led to a power struggle involving an offer of marriage to Wang Khan’s daughter. The final battle in which Chinggis Khan defeated the Kerait army was an important moment in his early career. After the battle, the Kerait people were incorporated into the Mongol political and military structure, along with many other formerly independent groups. And we can see that this story, rather than being a misconception, may have been an example of Marco’s Venetian shrewdness, choosing the conflict for Rusticello to transform into a romance that would be the most understandable for his European audience.

Much of the criticism of Marco Polo’s book focuses on what it omits. When we consider that his book offers the reader a description of the enormous world connecting the Black Sea coast to Korea, the caravan routes connecting Armenia and Persia to China, reports of the islands of Japan, the mountains of Tibet, the cities and provinces of China itself and the sea routes linking the kingdoms of Southeast Asia, the archipelago of Indonesia and the trading ports of East Africa and Arabia, there is plenty of opportunity to leave out any number of specific things.

So let us imagine a more perfect Book of Marco Polo, a manuscript that will be discovered in the future, written in the very un-literary Venetian dialect that was our adventurer/explorer/hero’s mother tongue. This would be the ur-text that all these other French, Franco-Italian, Tuscan, Latin, German and even Irish versions are based on.

So let us imagine a more perfect Book of Marco Polo, a manuscript that will be discovered in the future, written in the very un-literary Venetian dialect that was our adventurer/explorer/hero’s mother tongue. This would be the ur-text that all these other French, Franco-Italian, Tuscan, Latin, German and even Irish versions are based on.

In this manuscript all the problems raised by scholars and biographers over the centuries are solved. In this version Marco did learn Chinese and is well versed in Chinese history. He explains that the kingdom he lived in, formed by Kublai Khan’s war of conquest against the Song Dynasty, was the newly unified state incorporating a vast area that for the four hundred years following the dissolution of Tang China had been several separate countries. He explains that the northern kingdom already under Mongol rule when he arrived, where Kublai receives the Polos, was formed two centuries before by the Khitai, and that is why he calls the country Cathay. Both this northern region and the southern kingdom which he calls Mangi, along with the country of the Tanghut in the west and Tibet in the south will later be known as China. After carefully explaining this, Marco Polo warns later generations of European geographers not to confuse one for the other or all of them for the same thing.

He assists those of us attempting to trace his route from Venice to Cathay and back again on a contemporary map by admitting that he is not very precise in recalling the time it took to travel from one place to the next, at which point he carefully records the exact distance between each place he mentions. Then he points out the obvious: that the organization of the cities in his book has nothing to do with any specific journey. It is simply a way of describing the world he has seen.

He warns the sea captains of the future. “Consider how poorly the people of our time understand the extent of Asia and Africa,” he tells them. “Therefore you should not take your own explanations of what you have never seen too seriously.” He tells them that the world he describes is far greater than any we could imagine. He puts in writing the deathbed statement often attributed to him in legend: “In selecting material for my book I have not told half of what I saw.”

He adds a prophecy before closing this version of The Book: “In a dream I saw the word America written on a map. It is a name for the delusions of future mariners looking for the world I reached by land.” He conveys his hope that some readers of his book in the centuries to come will appreciate learning this from an ancient source.

A thousand years from now, this lost manuscript will be found in a vault. Beside it will be a yellowed paperback copy of Italo Calvino’s great prose poem, Invisible Cities translated into English. The acid-laced paper it is printed on will have all but disintegrated. For those few who can read ancient languages, this one passage remains: