book of Marco
Polo's travels was Marco's, and how much was the worthy Rusticiano's, we
are unable to decide. The facts in that famous book were duly vouched
for by Marco. The opening chapter, or prologue, inflated and wordy,
after the fashion of the times, was undoubtedly Rusticiano's. He began
thus: "Great Princes, Emperors, and Kings, Dukes and Marquises, Counts,
Knights, and Burgesses! and People of all degree who desire to get
knowledge of the various races of mankind and of the diversities of the
sundry regions of the World, take this Book and cause it to be read to
you. For ye shall find therein all kinds of wonderful things, and the
divers histories of the Great Hermenia, and of Persia, and of the Land
of the Tartars, and of India, and of many another country of which our
Book doth speak, particularly and in regular succession, according to
the description of Messer Marco Polo, a wise and noble citizen of
Venice, as he saw them with his own eyes."

This portentous prologue ends with these great swelling words: "And I
may tell you that in acquiring this knowledge he spent in those various
parts of the World good six-and-twenty years. Now, being thereafter an
inmate of the Prison at Genoa, he caused Messer Rusticiano, of Pisa, who
was in the same Prison likewise, to reduce the whole to writing; and
this befell in the year 1298 from the birth of Jesus."

One year later, in the summer of 1299, Marco Polo was set at liberty and
returned to Venice, where he died peacefully in 1324. His last will and
testament, dated January 9, 1323, is preserved among the archives of
Venice, and a marble statue in his honor was set up by the Venetians, in
the seventeenth century, and may be seen unto this day in the Palazzo
Morosini-Gattemburg, in the Campo S. Stefano of that city.

How came Marco Polo to be drawn so far into the vague and shadowy East?
Somewhere about the middle of the thirteenth century, certain members of
the Polo family had established a trading-house in Constantinople, then
pretty near the end of the world from Europe. These adventurous
Venetians, in 1260, sent the two brothers, Nicolo and Maffeo, still
further to the eastward on a trading journey to the Crimea. Led on by
one adventure and another, and lured by the hope of new and greater
gains, they ascended the Volga northward and eastward, crossed Bokhara,
and finally broke into one of the northwestern provinces of China, or
Cathay, then faintly known in Eur