XII.  CONTEMPORARY RECOGNITION OF POLO AND HIS BOOK.

[Sidenote:  How far was there diffusion of his Book in his own day?]

75.  But we must return for a little to Polo’s own times.  Ramusio states, as we have seen, that immediately after the first commission of Polo’s narrative to writing (in Latin as he imagined), many copies of it were made, it was translated into the vulgar tongue, and in a few months all Italy was full of it.

The few facts that we can collect do not justify this view of the rapid and diffused renown of the Traveller and his Book.  The number of MSS. of the latter dating from the 14th century is no doubt considerable, but a large proportion of these are of Pipino’s condensed Latin Translation, which was not put forth, if we can trust Ramusio, till 1320, and certainly not much earlier.  The whole number of MSS. in various languages that we have been able to register, amounts to about eighty.  I find it difficult to obtain statistical data as to the comparative number of copies of different works existing in manuscript.  With Dante’s great Poem, of which there are reckoned close upon 500 MSS.,[1] comparison would be inappropriate.  But of the Travels of Friar Odoric, a poor work indeed beside Marco Polo’s, I reckoned thirty-nine MSS., and could now add at least three more to the list. [I described seventy-three in my edition of Odoric.—­H.  C.] Also I find that of the nearly contemporary work of Brunetto Latini, the Tresor, a sort of condensed Encyclopaedia of knowledge, but a work which one would scarcely have expected to approach the popularity of Polo’s Book, the Editor enumerates some fifty MSS.  And from the great frequency with which one encounters in Catalogues both MSS. and early printed editions of Sir John Maundevile, I should suppose that the lying wonders of our English Knight had a far greater popularity and more extensive diffusion than the veracious and more sober marvels of Polo.[2] To Southern Italy Polo’s popularity certainly does not seem at any time to have extended.  I cannot learn that any MS. of his Book exists in any Library of the late Kingdom of Naples or in Sicily.[3]

Dante, who lived for twenty-three years after Marco’s work was written, and who touches so many things in the seen and unseen Worlds, never alludes to Polo, nor I think to anything that can be connected with his Book.  I believe that no mention of Cathay occurs in the Divina Commedia.  That distant region is indeed mentioned more than once in the poems of a humbler contemporary, Francesco da Barberino, but there is nothing in his allusions besides this name to suggest any knowledge of Polo’s work.[4]

Neither can I discover any trace of Polo or his work in that of his contemporary and countryman, Marino Sanudo the Elder, though this worthy is well acquainted with the somewhat later work of Hayton, and many of the subjects which he touches in his own book would seem to challenge a reference to Marco’s labours.