Few books are as well known to world historians as Marco Polo's Description of the World, popularly known as The Travels. Prominently featured on world history reading lists, Polo's book is often used as a primary source in understanding thirteenth-century world history. Now [End Page 220] Frances Wood, head of the China Department at the British Library, calls into question the validity of the Polo book's authorship and, more astoundingly, asks whether Polo even traveled to China.
Drawing upon work undertaken by German Mongolist scholars in the mid-1960s, Wood goes far beyond their research in her painstaking analysis. Did Marco Polo Go to China? is divided into fifteen short chapters. The first four place Polo's alleged travels into historical context. After giving an overview of Polo's journeys in Asia, Wood examines why Maffeo and Niccolo Polo would have trekked across Central Asia and taken the seventeen-year-old Marco in tow. She discusses not only the familiar importance of spices and other exotic items in the growing Eurasian trade, but also the secondary role of the Polos as religious missionaries in a time when medieval Europe had little direct knowledge of the state of religion in the East. She ends her analysis of Polo's times by examining the legend of Prester John, believed by many in the thirteenth century to be a Christian ruler in either south or east Asia. (Marco Polo contributed to the legend by stating that Prester John ruled over a kingdom on the rim of Inner Mongolia.)
The remaining eleven chapters of Wood's work deal with the problems and inconsistencies found in the Description. Chapter 5 examines the nature of Polo's route to Asia, arguing that no one today could retrace the supposed route beyond Persia, as it jumps not only from place to place within China itself, but also elsewhere in Asia, without logical connections between places. Wood argues that because Marco Polo does not describe the Polos' city-to-city travel, the book is more akin "to a general geography than a travel record" (p. 29). Moreover, she believes that an almost total lack of personal references and of first-person accounts suggests that the Description was actually ghost-written. The ghostwriter, a Pisan romance writer named Rustichello, shared a Genoese prison cell in 1298 with Marco Polo; it was to him that Polo ostensibly dictated his tale. Another significant difficulty related to the authorship of Polo's work is that the original manuscript does not survive and that the extant copies (about 150) may contain egregious additions by subsequent copyists. According to Wood, one such copyist, Giovanni Battista Ramusio (d. 1557), whom she calls Polo's "first fan," may have added many passages to his version of Polo's book in order to make it "fuller and more interesting" and to make Polo appear more heroic (p. 46).
Next, Wood focuses on the language of the text. She points out that most scholars believe the original work was written in some form of medieval French. Wood argues that Rustichello may have "Italianized" the French he used, and that subsequent translations have complicated [End Page 221] matters even more. One of the most interesting points she makes in this chapter is that Marco Polo made extensive use of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish proper names to describe Mongol and Chinese people and places, rather than using equivalent Chinese or Mongol terms. One explanation for this curiosity may be that the southwest Asian languages may have served as a kind of medieval lingua franca for Eurasian travelers and that Polo may have used them accordingly. Wood, however, offers a more convincing explanation. After an extensive analysis of Polo's use of personal and place names as well as place locations, she concludes that Polo may have borrowed his terms and locations from Persian and other sources.
The next four chapters (8-11) discuss the inclusions and omissions in Polo's work. Among the more familiar (and largely accurate) accounts of porcelain, coal, paper money, and daily life in Chinese cities, Wood notes Polo's glaring omission of Chinese writing. Chinese writing was found everywhere, appearing, for example, on paper money and in architecture. As Wood points out, "it is hard to conceive that in the country where paper money was invented and the written word revered more than almost anywhere else, a person, even a foreigner, could claim to have served in the government bureaucracy and either fail to notice the Mongol and the Chinese writing systems or consider them of little interest" (p. 70). Also noticeably absent from Polo's book is any mention of tea—a ubiquitous substance in China—or chop-sticks. Nor does he mention foot binding. Wood admits, however, that this custom was not as common in Mongol times as it was before or after. Another curious omission is any mention of the Great Wall. Although she admits that the Great Wall as it now exists—with brick-faced walls added during the Ming period (1368-1644)—is more impressive than it would have appeared in the thirteenth century, Wood believes that the wall still would have made an impression on any traveler coming from the West. Its omission from Polo's book, she writes, "is telling" (p. 101). Another telling omission is that, despite Marco Polo's claim that during his seventeen-year stay in China he had frequent contact with the Great Khan, there is no mention of Polo in official or unofficial Mongol or Chinese records of the time.
There are many myths associated with Marco Polo. Wood devotes two chapters (9 and 12) to dispelling myths about the Venetian traveler. One myth concerns Marco Polo's connection to the introduction of pasta and ice cream to Italy from China. Pasta was an Arab invention, introduced into Italy in the ninth century, while ice cream, apparently a Chinese invention of the Tang dynasty (618-907), did not appear in Europe until some 300 years after Polo's death. A second myth is one [End Page 222] Polo created about himself, his father, and uncle: that they were the first Europeans to visit Qubilai Khan. Wood points out that the Polos may have been the first Italians in Karakorum, the Mongol capital, but that when they arrived the city already contained a thriving European merchant and missionary community. Another myth surrounds Polo's claim that he was a siege engineer and that he and his family aided in the pivotal Mongol siege of Xiangyang, a major stronghold of the Song dynasty. Not only do Mongol sources state explicitly that Persian engineers were consulted in the siege preparations, but also the successful siege of the city ended in 1273, a year before the Polos arrived in China.
After much excellent scholarly build-up, Wood draws her conclusions about the usefulness of Marco Polo's Description of the World. In a passage certain to raise the eyebrows of the most ardent Polo defenders, she states her belief that the Venetian never traveled beyond the Black Sea, and that his book is based on family stories and printed secondary material from other authors. But she argues that even though the book is not an eyewitness account, it still contains useful and accurate details of China during the thirteenth century and, consequently, "remains a very rich source" (p. 150).
Frances Wood has written an excellent and lucid analysis of an important topic and has made a significant contribution to scholarship in this area. Anyone interested in world history, or in the pitfalls of using travel narratives as primary sources, will want to read this book.
