In a grey mantle from the top of bushes
The cuckoo sings: 
Verily—­may the Lord shield me!—­
Well do I write under the greenwood.[27]

Then there were always jugglers and tumblers, and men with performing bears, and minstrels to wheedle Bodo’s few pence out of his pocket.  And it would be a very tired and happy family that trundled home in the cart to bed.  For it is not, after all, so dull in the kitchen, and when we have quite finished with the emperor, ‘Charlemagne and all his peerage’, it is really worth while to spend a few moments with Bodo in his little manse.  History is largely made up of Bodos.

CHAPTER III

Marco Polo

A VENETIAN TRAVELLER OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

Et por ce, veul ie que un et autre sachent a tos iors mais les euvres des Veneciens, et qui il furent, et dont il vindrent, et qui il sont, et comment il firent la noble Cite que l’en apele Venise, qui est orendroit la plus bele dou siecle....  La place de Monseignor Saint Marc est orendroit la plus bele place qui soit en tot li monde; que de vers li soleil levant est la plus bele yglise qui soit el monde, c’est l’Yglise de Monseignor Saint Marc.  Et de les cele Yglise est li paleis de Monseignor li Dus, grant e biaus a mervoilles.

          —­MARTINO DA CANALE

And Kinsai [Hangchow] is the greatest city in the whole world, so great indeed that I should scarcely venture to tell of it, but that I have met at Venice people in plenty who have been there....  And if anyone should desire to tell of all the vastness and great marvels of this city, a good quire of paper would not hold the matter, I trow.  For ’tis the greatest and noblest city, and the finest for merchandise, that the whole world containeth.

          —­ODORIC OF PORDENONE

Let us go back in mind—­as would that we could go back in body—­to the year 1268.  It is a year which makes no great stir in the history books, but it will serve us well.  In those days, as in our own, Venice lay upon her lagoons, a city (as Cassiodurus long ago saw her[B]) like a sea-bird’s nest afloat on the shallow waves, a city like a ship, moored to the land but only at home upon the seas, the proudest city in all the Western world.  For only consider her position.  Lying at the head of the Adriatic, half-way between East and West, on the one great sea thoroughfare of medieval commerce, a Mediterranean seaport, yet set so far north that she was almost in the heart of Europe, Venice gathered into her harbour all the trade routes overland and overseas, on which pack-horses could travel or ships sail.  Merchants bringing silk and spices, camphor and ivory, pearls and scents and carpets from the Levant and from the hot lands beyond it, all came to port in Venice.  For whether they came by way of Egypt sailing between the low banks of the Nile and jolting