SOURCE: "Epilogue," in Marco Polo, Venetian Adventurer, University of Oklahoma Press, 1967, pp. 233-64.

In the following excerpt, Hart examines the impact of Polo's book on the sciences of geography and cartography.

Messer Marco Polo's reputation for veracity as an author suffered greatly during his lifetime, for his contemporaries (with very few exceptions) could not and did not accept his book seriously. Their ignorance and bigotry, their belief in and dependence on the ecclesiastical pseudogeography of the day, their preconceived ideas of the unvisited parts of the earth, as well as the inherited legends and utter nonsense to which the medieval mind clung with a blind persistence that is incomprehensible to modern man—all these factors combined to make it impossible to perceive or accept the truths contained in Marco's writings.

Jacopo d'Acqui, a contemporary of the traveler, records an anecdote which may be true. Marco's friends were evidently...