The matter is of some interest, because in the Will of the younger Maffeo, which is extant, he makes a bequest to his uncle (_Avunculus_) Jordan Trevisan. This seems an indication that his mother’s name may have been Trevisan. The same Maffeo had a daughter _Fiordelisa_. And Marco the Elder, in his Will (1280), appoints as his executors, during the absence of his brothers, the same Jordan Trevisan and his own sister-in-law _Fiordelisa_ (“Jordanum Trivisanum de confinio S. Antonini: et Flordelisam cognatam meam”). Hence I conjecture that this _cognata Fiordelisa_ (Trevisan?) was the wife of the absent Nicolo, and the mother of Maffeo. In that case of course Maffeo and Marco were the sons of different mothers. With reference to the above suggestion of Nicolo’s second marriage in 1269 there is a curious variation in a fragmentary Venetian Polo in the Barberini Library at Rome. It runs, in the passage corresponding to the latter part of ch. ix. of Prologue: “i qual do fratelli steteno do anni in Veniezia aspettando la elletion de nuovo Papa, _nel qual tempo Mess. Nicolo si tolse moier et si la lasò graveda._” I believe, however, that it is only a careless misrendering of Pipino’s statement about Marco’s birth. [13] [Major Sykes, in his remarkable book on _Persia_, ch. xxiii. pp. 262–263, does not share Sir Henry Yule’s opinion regarding this itinerary, and he writes: “To return to our travellers, who started on their second great journey in 1271, Sir Henry Yule, in his introduction,[A] makes them travel _viâ_ Sivas to Mosul and Baghdád, and thence by sea to Hormuz, and this is the itinerary shown on his sketch map. This view I am unwilling to accept for more than one reason. In the first place, if, with Colonel Yule, we suppose that Ser Marco visited Baghdád, is it not unlikely that he should term the River Volga the Tigris,[B] and yet leave the river of Baghdád nameless? It may be urged that Marco believed the legend of the reappearance of the Volga in Kurdistán, but yet, if the text be read with care and the character of the traveller be taken into account, this error is scarcely explicable in any other way, than that he was never there. “Again, he gives no description of the striking buildings of Baudas, as he terms it, but this is nothing to the inaccuracy of his supposed onward journey. To quote the text, ‘A very great river flows through the city, ... and merchants descend some eighteen days from Baudas, and then come to a certain city called Kisi,[C] where they enter the Sea of India.’ Surely Marco, had he travelled down the Persian Gulf, would never have given this description of the route, which is so untrue as to point to the conclusion that it was vague information given by some merchant whom he met in the course of his wanderings.