Asia -- Description and travel -- Early works to 1800; Mongols -- History; Polo, Marco, 1254-1323?; Voyages and travels
The Dominican Friar Jacopo of Acqui was a contemporary of Polo’s,
and was the author of a somewhat obscure Chronicle called _Imago
Mundi_.[29] Now this Chronicle does contain mention of Marco’s capture
in action by the Genoese, but attributes it to a different action
from Curzola, and one fought at a time when Polo could not have been
present. The passage runs as follows in a manuscript of the Ambrosian
Library, according to an extract given by Baldelli Boni:—
“In the year of Christ MCCLXXXXVI, in the time of Pope Boniface
VI., of whom we have spoken above, a battle was fought in Arminia,
at the place called Layaz, between xv. galleys of Genoese merchants
and xxv. of Venetian merchants; and after a great fight the galleys
of the Venetians were beaten, and (the crews) all slain or taken;
and among them was taken Messer Marco the Venetian, who was in
company with those merchants, and who was called _Milono_, which
is as much as to say ‘a thousand thousand pounds,’ for so goes
the phrase in Venice. So this Messer Marco Milono the Venetian,
with the other Venetian prisoners, is carried off to the prison
of Genoa, and there kept for a long time. This Messer Marco was a
long time with his father and uncle in Tartary, and he there saw
many things, and made much wealth, and also learned many things,
for he was a man of ability. And so, being in prison at Genoa,
he made a Book concerning the great wonders of the World, _i.e._,
concerning such of them as he had seen. And what he told in the
Book was not as much as he had really seen, because of the tongues
of detractors, who, being ready to impose their own lies on others,
are over hasty to set down as lies what they in their perversity
disbelieve, or do not understand. And because there are many great
and strange things in that Book, which are reckoned past all
credence, he was asked by his friends on his death-bed to correct
the Book by removing everything that went beyond the facts. To
which his reply was that he had not told _one-half_ of what he had
really seen!”[30]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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