The Book of Wonder

Marco Polo

Description

The most renowned travel story of the Middle Ages has never lost its allure. A story of true wonder, Marco Polo's experiences as well as the reported myths, transport us to the heart of Central Asia, China, Indochina, and the Indian Ocean. The original manuscripts were accompanied with illustrations realised from the few descriptions made by the traveller. Following in the footsteps of Marco Polo, the various illustrations found here will send the reader on the path to discovering the distant lands as we know them today.

Sujets

• Islam
• Wonders
• Middle East
• Maps
• Iran
• India
• Buddhism
• Asia
• Adventures
• Painting
• Plan (drawing)
• The Adventures
• Travel (disambiguation)
• Engraving
• Map
• China
• Marco Polo
• Sculpture

Informations

• Publié par: Parkstone International
• Date de parution: 04 juillet 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783107957
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Authors:
Marco Polo
With contributions by John Masefield

Layout:
Baseline Co. Ltd
61A-63A Vo Van Tan Street
4 th Floor
District 3, Ho Chi Minh City
Vietnam

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All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers, artists, heirs or estates. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

ISBN: 978-1-78310-795-7
Marco Polo



THE BOOK OF WONDER

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
JOHN MASEFIELD
Gaetano Bonutti , Venetian Traveller Marco Polo , c. 1295.
Engraving. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
CONTENT


Prologue & Itinerary
PROLOGUE
ITINERARY
Book I
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
Book II.
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
Book III
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
CHAPTER 76
CHAPTER 77
CHAPTER 78
CHAPTER 79
CHAPTER 80
CHAPTER 81
CHAPTER 82
Conclusion
Index

Prologue & Itinerary


Marco Polo is perhaps the most well-known Western figure to travel into the mysterious and mystifying great East. Providing well-described tales of his journey, Polo ’ s stories are likely to awaken the inner traveller in anyone who reads or hears of his saga. True or exaggerated, Polo ’ s twenty-four-year voyage across land and sea exhibits his, at the time, unheard-of determination and influence. Even the Great Khan, conqueror and ruler of much of the Eastern land of the time, found a great confidant in Marco Polo and managed to keep him under his tutelage for seventeen years. Under the Great Khan, Polo was able to acquire power and prestige across the land, likely contributing to his immensely delayed return to Venice. Thus begins the tale of Marco Polo ’ s travels…

PROLOGUE
Ye Emperors, Kings, Dukes, Marquises, Earls, and Knights, and all other people desirous of knowing the diversities of the races of mankind, as well as the diversities of kingdoms, provinces, and regions of all parts of the East, read through this book, and ye will find in it the greatest and most marvellous characteristics of the peoples, especially of Armenia, Persia, India, and Tartary, as they are severally related in the present work by Marco Polo, a wise and learned citizen of Venice, who states distinctly what things he saw and what things he heard from others.
For this book will be a truthful one. It must be known, then, that from the creation of Adam to the present day, no man, whether Pagan, or Saracen, or Christian, or other, of whatever progeny or generation he may have been, ever saw or inquired into so many and such great things as Marco Polo. Who, wishing in his secret thoughts that the things he had seen and heard should be made public by the present work, for the benefit of those who could not see them with their own eyes, he himself being in the year of our Lord 1295 in prison at Genoa, caused the things which are contained in the present work to be written by Master Rustigielo, a citizen of Pisa, who was with him in the same prison in Genoa; he divided it into three parts.

ITINERARY
The elder Polos, when they left Constantinople in 1260, had not planned to go far beyond the northern borders of the Euxine. They first landed at Soldaia, in Crimea, then an important trading city. From Soldaia they journeyed in a northerly and east-north-easterly direction to Sara (or Sarra), a vast city on the Volga, where King Cambuscan lived, and to Bolgara (or Bolghar) where they stayed for a year. Going south a short distance to Ucaca, another city on the Volga, they journeyed directly to the south-east, across the northern head of the Caspian, on the sixty days’ march to Bokhara, where they stayed for three years.
From Bokhara they went with the Great Khan’s people northward to Otrar, and thence in a north-easterly direction to the Court of the Khan near Pekin. On their return journey, they arrived at the sea-coast at Layas, in Armenia. From Layas they went to Acre, and from Acre to Negropont in Romania, and from Negropont to Venice, where they stayed for about two years.
On the second journey to the East, with the young Marco Polo, they sailed directly from Venice to Acre towards the end of 1271. They made a short journey southward to Jerusalem, for the holy oil, and then returned to Acre for letters from the Papal Legate.
Leaving Acre, they got as far as Layas, in Armenia, before they were recalled by the newly elected Pope. On setting out again, they returned to Layas, at that time a great city, where spices and cloth of gold were sold, and from which merchants journeying to the East generally started. From Layas they pushed northward into Turcomania, past Casaria and Sivas, to Arzingan, where the people wove “good buckrams”.
Petrus Vesconte, Water Atlas of the Mediterranean, Genoa, 1313.
Fourth sheet: Eastern Mediterranean, coasts of Asia and Africa.
Coast of Morea, Rhodes, Crete, and the Nile Delta.
Six cards, illuminated manuscript on vellum, various scales,
48 x 40 cm each. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
Petrus Vesconte, Water Atlas of the Mediterranean, Genoa, 1313. Sixth sheet: Western Mediterranean.
Six cards, illuminated manuscript on vellum, various scales,
48 x 40 cm each. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.


Passing Mount Ararat, where Noah’s Ark was supposed to rest, they heard stories of the Baku oilfields. From here they went to the south-east, following the course of the Tigris to Bandas. From Bandas they seem to have made an unnecessary journey to the Persian Gulf. The book leads one to suppose that they travelled by way of Tauriz (in Persian Iraq), Yezd, and Kerman, to the port of Ormuz, as though they intended to take to sea there. They could, however, have progressed more swiftly had they followed the Tigris to Busrah and sailed upon the Gulf from there, by way of Keis or Kisi to Ormuz.
After visiting Ormuz, they returned to Kerman by another route, and then pushed on, over the horrible salt desert of Kerman, through Khorassan to Balakshan. It is possible that their journey was broken at Balakshan, owing to the illness of Marco, who speaks of having at some time stayed nearly a year here to recover his health.
On leaving Balakshan they proceeded through the high Pamirs to Kash-gar, thence south-eastward by way of Khotan, not yet buried under the sands, to the Gobi desert. The Gobi desert, like all deserts, had a bad name as being “the abode of many evil spirits, which amuse travellers to their destruction”. The Polos crossed the Gobi in the usual thirty days, halting each night by the brackish ponds which make the passage possible.
After crossing the desert, they soon entered China. At Kan Chau, one of the first Chinese cities which they visited, they may have stayed for nearly a year, on account of “the state of their concerns”, but this stay probably took place later, when they were in Kublai’s service. They then crossed the province of Shen-si, into that of Shan-si, finally arriving at Kai-ping-fu, where Kublai had built his summer pleasure garden.
On the return journey, the Polos set sail from the port of Zaitum, in the province of Fo-Kien. They hugged the Chinese coast (in order to avoid the Pratas and Pracel Reefs) and crossed the Gulf of Tong King to Champa in the south-east of Cambodia. Leaving Champa, they may have made some stay at Borneo, but more probably they sailed direct to the island of Bintang, at the mouth of the Straits of Malacca, and to Sumatra, where the fleet was delayed for five months by the blowing of the contrary monsoon. The ships seem to have waited for the monsoon to change in a harbour on the north-east coast, in the Kingdom of Sumatra.
On getting a fair wind, they passed by the Nicobar and Andaman Islands, and then shaped a course for Ceylon. They put across to the coast of Coromandel, and may perhaps have coasted as far to the north upon the Madras coast as Masulipatam.
On the Bombay side, they would seem to have hugged the coast as far as they could, as far perhaps as Surat, in the Gulf of Cambay; but it is just possible that the descriptions of these places were taken from the tales of ship captains, and that this fleet put boldly out to avoid the coast pirates.
There is much reason to believe that, whilst employed in the service of the emperor, Marco Polo had visited some of the eastern islands, lying the nearest to the coast of China, such, perhaps, as the Philippines.
Marco Polo tells us much about Aden, and about towns on the Arabian coasts, but the fleet probably never reached them. All that is certainly known is that they arrived at Ormuz, in the Persian Gulf, and passed inland to Khorassan. On leaving Khorassan they journeyed overland, through Persia and Greater Armenia, until they ca