The Book.* Here is retold the story of two ancients and a man of middle age who, in 1295 A. D., returned to their native Venice after an absence of 26 years, so changed that they had to beat their way into their own house past forgetful relatives. They drove doubt from their listeners' minds by many changes of rich raiment during a banquet they straightway held, and by slitting seams of the rags they had arrived in and pouring forth heaps of jade, diamonds, rubies and other stones of the Far East. Even then they were not fully believed, and from the numbers of men and the distances they described, their audiences became known as "the court of the millions." Until just last year one of the things they related — of a sheep with great horns — was still regarded as semi-fabulous.† English schoolboys still call a dubious story a "Marco Polo."
Yet Marco was not an imaginative man. He was a shrewd merchant, businesslike. When he was imprisoned, fighting for Venice at Genoa in 1298, rather than waste time he employed an amanuensis and dictated a careful account of what his father (Nicolo) and uncle (Maffeo) and self had seen. He indited the script to "Emperors, Kings, Dukes, Marquises, Earls and Knights," full knowing that the house of Polo would profit by the advertisement. Copies of this manuscript were made in several tongues, which scholars and explorers have annotated through the centuries. The present volume is the classic translation by Scholar Marsden of England (1818), edited now with reference to the most modern scientific research and with an aim forgotten since Marsden's time, in a welter of notes, namely, to make the Polos' travels readable primarily as rare narrative.