“The Book of Marco Polo,” as Rusticiano of Pisa called his work, was read with much interest and was translated into many languages. For many centuries it was the only European description of the far East, written by an eye-witness. Polo was accused of falsehood and exaggeration, but as people learned more about the lands he described, they found that, in the main, he was right; he was truthful and accurate in describing what he had seen, but he was sometimes misled by the tales of others to whom he listened. In the prologue, Rusticiano says that he describes things seen by “Messer Marco Polo, a wise and noble citizen of Venice.... Some things indeed there be therein which he beheld not; but these he heard from men of credit and veracity, and we shall set down things seen as seen, and things heard as heard only, so that no jot of falsehood may mar the truth of our book and that all who shall read it or hear it read may put full faith in the truth of all its contents.” Marco Polo was the first European traveler to make his way across the whole length of Asia, naming and describing the kingdoms which he visited. He was the first to describe the Pamir plateau, “the roof of the world,” the highest level country on the globe, the deserts and flowery plains of Persia, the wealth and size of China, the manners and customs of its people, and the splendid court of its emperor, the great Kublai Khan. He was the first to describe Tibet, and to tell of Burmah, Cochin-China, Siam, Japan, Java, Sumatra, Ceylon, and India, not merely as names but as places he had seen and known. He gave an account of the secluded Christian empire of Abyssinia, of the tropical luxuriance of the far-off islands, of the negroes and ivory of Zanzibar, of vast and distant Madagascar, of Siberia and the Arctic shores with their dog-sledges, white bears, and reindeer. In brief, he described Asia from Siberia and the Arctic Ocean, to Ceylon, from the Adriatic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, and to him Europe owes its first geographical knowledge of Asia.