[20] The French text which forms the basis of my translation says that,
    excluding mariners, there were 600 souls, out of whom only 8 survived. 
    The older MS. which I quote as G. T., makes the number 18, a fact that
    I had overlooked till the sheets were printed off.

[21] Died 12th March, 1291.

[22] All dates are found so corrupt that even in this one I do not feel
    absolute confidence.  Marco in dictating the book is aware that Ghazan
    had attained the throne of Persia (see vol. i. p. 36, and ii. pp. 50
    and 477), an event which did not occur till October, 1295.  The date
    assigned to it, however, by Marco (ii. 477) is 1294, or the year
    before that assigned to the return home.

The travellers may have stopped some time at Constantinople on their way, or even may have visited the northern shores of the Black Sea; otherwise, indeed, how did Marco acquire his knowledge of that Sea (ii. 486-488) and of events in Kipchak (ii. 496 seqq.)?  If 1296 was the date of return, moreover, the six-and-twenty years assigned in the preamble as the period of Marco’s absence (p. 2) would be nearer accuracy.  For he left Venice in the spring or summer of 1271.

[23] Marco Barbaro, in his account of the Polo family, tells what seems to
    be the same tradition in a different and more mythical version:—­

“From ear to ear the story has past till it reached mine, that when the three Kinsmen arrived at their home they were dressed in the most shabby and sordid manner, insomuch that the wife of one of them gave away to a beggar that came to the door one of those garments of his, all torn, patched, and dirty as it was.  The next day he asked his wife for that mantle of his, in order to put away the jewels that were sewn up in it; but she told him she had given it away to a poor man, whom she did not know.  Now, the stratagem he employed to recover it was this.  He went to the Bridge of Rialto, and stood there turning a wheel, to no apparent purpose, but as if he were a madman, and to all those who crowded round to see what prank was this, and asked him why he did it, he answered:  ‘He’ll come if God pleases.’  So after two or three days he recognised his old coat on the back of one of those who came to stare at his mad proceedings, and got it back again.  Then, indeed, he was judged to be quite the reverse of a madman!  And from those jewels he built in the contrada of S. Giovanni Grisostomo a very fine palace for those days; and the family got among the vulgar the name of the Ca’ Million, because the report was that they had jewels to the value of a million of ducats; and the palace has kept that name to the present day—­viz., 1566.” (Genealogies, MS. copy in Museo Civico; quoted also by Baldelli Boni, Vita, p. xxxi.)

[24] The Will of the Elder Marco, to which we have several times referred,
    is dated at Rialto 5th August, 1280.