The Travels of Marco Polo Volume I Part 28

[19] "Note here that the Genoese generally, commonly, and by nature, are the most covetous of Men, and the Love of Gain spurs them to every Crime. Yet are they deemed also the most valiant Men in the World.

Such an one was Lampa, of that very Doria family, a man of an high Courage truly. For when he was engaged in a Sea-Fight against the Venetians, and was standing on the p.o.o.p of his Galley, his Son, fighting valiantly at the Forecastle, was shot by an Arrow in the Breast, and fell wounded to the Death; a Mishap whereat his Comrades were sorely shaken, and Fear came upon the whole s.h.i.+p's Company. But Lampa, hot with the Spirit of Battle, and more mindful of his Country's Service and his own Glory than of his Son, ran forward to the spot, loftily rebuked the agitated Crowd, and ordered his Son's Body to be cast into the Deep, telling them for their Comfort that the Land could never have afforded his Boy a n.o.bler Tomb. And then, renewing the Fight more fiercely than ever, he achieved the Victory."

(_Benvenuto of Imola_, in _Comment. on Dante. in Muratori, Antiq._ i.

1146.)

("Yet like an English General will I die, And all the Ocean make my s.p.a.cious Grave; Women and Cowards on the Land may lie, The Sea's the Tomb that's proper for the Brave!"

--_Annus Mirabilis_.)

[20] The particulars of the battle are gathered from _Ferretus Vicentinus_, in _Murat._ ix. 985 seqq.; _And. Dandulo_, in xii.

407-408; _Navagiero_, in xxiii. 1009-1010; and the Genoese Poem as before.

[21] _Navagiero_, u.s. Dandulo says, "after a few days he died of grief"; Ferretus, that he was killed in the action and buried at Curzola.

[22] For the funeral, a MS. of Cibo Recco quoted by _Jacopo Doria_ in _La Chiesa di San Matteo descritta_, etc., Genova, 1860, p. 26. For the date of arrival the poem so often quoted:--

"_De Oitover_, a zoia, _a seze di_ Lo nostro ostel, con gran festa En nostro porto, a or di sesta Domine De rest.i.tui."

[23] S. Matteo was built by Martin Doria in 1125, but pulled down and rebuilt by the family in a slightly different position in 1278. On this occasion is recorded a remarkable antic.i.p.ation of the feats of American engineering: "As there was an ancient and very fine picture of Christ upon the apse of the Church, it was thought a great pity that so fine a work should be destroyed. And so they contrived an ingenious method by which the apse bodily was transported without injury, picture and all, for a distance of 25 ells, and firmly set upon the foundations where it now exists." (_Jacopo de Varagine_ in _Muratori_, vol. ix. 36.)

The inscription on S. Matteo regarding the battle is as follows:--"_Ad Honorem Dei et Beate Virginis Marie Anno MCCLx.x.xXVIII Die Dominico VII Septembris iste Angelus captus fuit in Gulfo Venetiarum in Civitate Scursole et ibidem fuit prelium Galearum LXXVI Januensium c.u.m Galeis Lx.x.xXVI Veneciarum. Capte fuerunt Lx.x.xIIII per n.o.bilem Virum Dominum Lambam Aurie Capitaneum et Armiratum tunc Comunis et Populi Janue c.u.m omnibus existentibus in eisdem, de quibus conduxit Janue homines vivos carceratos VII cccc et Galeas XVIII, reliquas LXVI fecit c.u.mburi in dicto Gulfo Veneciarum. Qui obiit Sagone I. MCCCXXIII._" It is not clear to what the _Angelus_ refers.

[24] _Rampoldi, Ann. Musulm._ ix. 217.

[25] _Jacopo Doria_, p. 280.

[26] _Murat._ xxiii. 1010. I learn from a Genoese gentleman, through my friend Professor Henry Giglioli (to whose kindness I owe the transcript of the inscription just given), that a faint tradition exists as to the place of our traveller's imprisonment. It is alleged to have been a ma.s.sive building, standing between the _Grazie_ and the Mole, and bearing the name of the _Malapaga_, which is now a barrack for Doganieri, but continued till comparatively recent times to be used as a civil prison. "It is certain," says my informant, "that men of fame in arms who had fallen into the power of the Genoese _were_ imprisoned there, and among others is recorded the name of the Corsican Giudice dalla Rocca and Lord of Cinarca, who died there in 1312;" a date so near that of Marco's imprisonment as to give some interest to the hypothesis, slender as are its grounds. Another Genoese, however, indicates as the scene of Marco's captivity certain old prisons near the Old a.r.s.enal, in a site still known as the _Vico degli Schiavi_. (_Celesia, Dante in Liguria_, 1865, p. 43.) [Was not the place of Polo's captivity the bas.e.m.e.nt of the _Palazzo del Capitan del Popolo_, afterwards _Palazzo del Comune al Mare_, where the Customs (_Dogana_) had their office, and from the 15th century the _Casa_ or _Palazzo di S. Giorgio?_--H. C.]

[27] The Treaty and some subsidiary doc.u.ments are printed in the Genoese _Liber Jurium_, forming a part of the _Monumenta Historiae Patriae_, published at Turin. (See _Lib. Jur._ II. 344, seqq.) Muratori in his Annals has followed John Villani (Bk. VIII. ch. 27) in representing the terms as highly unfavourable to Venice. But for this there is no foundation in the doc.u.ments. And the terms are stated with substantial accuracy in Navagiero. (_Murat. Script._ xxiii. 1011.)

[28] _Paulin Paris, Les Ma.n.u.scrits Francois de la Bibliotheque du Roi_, ii. 355.

[29] Though there is no precise information as to the birth or death of this writer, who belonged to a n.o.ble family of Lombardy, the Bellingeri, he can be traced with tolerable certainty as in life in 1289, 1320, and 1334. (See the Introduction to his Chronicle in the Turin _Monumenta_, _Scriptores_ III.)

[30] There is another MS. of the _Imago Mundi_ at Turin, which has been printed in the _Monumenta_. The pa.s.sage about Polo in that copy differs widely in wording, is much shorter, and contains no date. But it relates his capture as having taken place at _La Glaza_, which I think there can be no doubt is also intended for Ayas (sometimes called _Giazza_), a place which in fact is called _Glaza_ in three of the MSS. of which various readings are given in the edition of the Societe de Geographie (p. 535).

[31] "E per meio esse aregordenti De si grande scacho mato Correa mille duxenti Zonto ge novanta e quatro."

The Armenian Prince Hayton or Hethum has put it under 1293. (See _Langlois, Mem. sur les Relations de Genes avec la Pet.i.te-Armenie_.)

VII. RUSTICIANO OR RUSTICh.e.l.lO OF PISA, MARCO POLO'S FELLOW-PRISONER AT GENOA, THE SCRIBE WHO WROTE DOWN THE TRAVELS.

38. We have now to say something of that Rusticiano to whom all who value Polo's book are so much indebted.

[Sidenote: Rusticiano, perhaps a prisoner from Meloria.]

The relations between Genoa and Pisa had long been so hostile that it was only too natural in 1298 to find a Pisan in the gaol of Genoa. An unhappy mult.i.tude of such prisoners had been carried thither fourteen years before, and the survivors still lingered there in vastly dwindled numbers.

In the summer of 1284 was fought the battle from which Pisa had to date the commencement of her long decay. In July of that year the Pisans, at a time when the Genoese had no fleet in their own immediate waters, had advanced to the very port of Genoa and shot their defiance into the proud city in the form of silver-headed arrows, and stones belted with scarlet.[1] They had to pay dearly for this insult. The Genoese, recalling their cruisers, speedily mustered a fleet of eighty-eight galleys, which were placed under the command of another of that ill.u.s.trious House of Doria, the Scipios of Genoa as they have been called, Uberto, the elder brother of Lamba. Lamba himself with his six sons, and another brother, was in the fleet, whilst the whole number of Dorias who fought in the ensuing action amounted to 250, most of them on board one great galley bearing the name of the family patron, St. Matthew.[2]

The Pisans, more than one-fourth inferior in strength, came out boldly, and the battle was fought off the Porto Pisano, in fact close in front of Leghorn, where a lighthouse on a remarkable arched bas.e.m.e.nt still marks the islet of MELORIA, whence the battle got its name. The day was the 6th of August, the feast of St. Sixtus, a day memorable in the Pisan Fasti for several great victories. But on this occasion the defeat of Pisa was overwhelming. Forty of their galleys were taken or sunk, and upwards of 9000 prisoners carried to Genoa. In fact so vast a sweep was made of the flower of Pisan manhood that it was a common saying then: "_Che vuol veder Pisa, vada a Genova_!" Many n.o.ble ladies of Pisa went in large companies on foot to Genoa to seek their husbands or kinsmen: "And when they made enquiry of the Keepers of the Prisons, the reply would be, 'Yesterday there died thirty of them, to-day there have died forty; all of whom we have cast into the sea; and so it is daily.'"[3]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Seal of the Pisan Prisoners.]

A body of prisoners so numerous and important naturally exerted themselves in the cause of peace, and through their efforts, after many months of negotiation, a formal peace was signed (15th April, 1288). But through the influence, as was alleged, of Count Ugolino (Dante's) who was then in power at Pisa, the peace became abortive; war almost immediately recommenced, and the prisoners had no release.[4] And, when the 6000 or 7000 Venetians were thrown into the prisons of Genoa in October 1298, they would find there the scanty surviving remnant of the Pisan Prisoners of Meloria, and would gather from them dismal forebodings of the fate before them.

It is a fair conjecture that to that remnant Rusticiano of Pisa may have belonged.

We have seen Ramusio's representation of the kindness shown to Marco during his imprisonment by a certain Genoese gentleman who also a.s.sisted him to reduce his travels to writing. We may be certain that this Genoese gentleman is only a distorted image of Rusticiano, the Pisan prisoner in the gaol of Genoa, whose name and part in the history of his hero's book Ramusio so strangely ignores. Yet patriotic Genoese writers in our own times have striven to determine the ident.i.ty of this their imaginary countryman![5]

[Sidenote: Rusticiano, a person known from other sources.]

39. Who, then, was Rusticiano, or, as the name actually is read in the oldest type of MS., "Messire Rustacians de Pise"?

Our knowledge of him is but scanty. Still something is known of him besides the few words concluding his preamble to our Traveller's Book, which you may read at pp. 1-2 of the body of this volume.

In Sir Walter Scott's "Essay on Romance," when he speaks of the new mould in which the subjects of the old metrical stories were cast by the school of prose romancers which arose in the 13th century, we find the following words:--

"Whatever fragments or shadows of true history may yet remain hidden under the ma.s.s of acc.u.mulated fable which had been heaped upon them during successive ages, must undoubtedly be sought in the metrical romances.... But those prose authors who wrote under the imaginary names of RUSTICIEN DE PISE, Robert de Borron, and the like, usually seized upon the subject of some old minstrel; and recomposing the whole narrative after their own fas.h.i.+on, with additional character and adventure, totally obliterated in that operation any shades which remained of the original and probably authentic tradition," &c.[6]

Evidently, therefore, Sir Walter regarded Rustician of Pisa as a person belonging to the same ghostly company as his own Cleishbothams and Dryasdusts. But in this we see that he was wrong.

In the great Paris Library and elsewhere there are ma.n.u.script volumes containing the stories of the Round Table abridged and somewhat clumsily combined from the various Prose Romances of that cycle, such as _Sir Tristan, Lancelot, Palamedes, Giron le Courtois_, &c., which had been composed, it would seem, by various Anglo-French gentlemen at the court of Henry III., styled, or styling themselves, Ga.s.ses le Blunt, Luces du Gast, Robert de Borron, and Helis de Borron. And these abridgments or recasts are professedly the work of _Le Maistre Rusticien de Pise_. Several of them were printed at Paris in the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries as the works of Rusticien de Pise; and as the preambles and the like, especially in the form presented in those printed editions, appear to be due sometimes to the original composers (as Robert and Helis de Borron) and sometimes to Rusticien de Pise the recaster, there would seem to have been a good deal of confusion made in regard to their respective personalities.

From a preamble to one of those compilations which undoubtedly belongs to Rustician, and which we shall quote at length by and bye, we learn that Master Rustician "translated" (or perhaps _transferred?_) his compilation from a book belonging to King Edward of England, at the time when that prince went beyond seas to recover the Holy Sepulchre. Now Prince Edward started for the Holy Land in 1270, spent the winter of that year in Sicily, and arrived in Palestine in May 1271. He quitted it again in August, 1272, and pa.s.sed again by Sicily, where in January, 1273, he heard of his father's death and his own consequent accession. Paulin Paris supposes that Rustician was attached to the Sicilian Court of Charles of Anjou, and that Edward "may have deposited with that king the Romances of the Round Table, of which all the world was talking, but the ma.n.u.scripts of which were still very rare, especially those of the work of Helye de Borron[7] ... whether by order, or only with permission of the King of Sicily, our Rustician made haste to read, abridge, and re-arrange the whole, and when Edward returned to Sicily he recovered possession of the book from which the indefatigable Pisan had extracted the contents."

But this I believe is, in so far as it pa.s.ses the facts stated in Rustician's own preamble, pure hypothesis, for nothing is cited that connects Rustician with the King of Sicily. And if there be not some such confusion of personality as we have alluded to, in another of the preambles, which is quoted by Dunlop as an utterance of Rustician's, that personage would seem to claim to have been a comrade in arms of the two de Borrons. We might, therefore, conjecture that Rustician himself had accompanied Prince Edward to Syria.[8]

[Sidenote: Character of Rustician's Romance compilations.]

40. Rustician's literary work appears from the extracts and remarks of Paulin Paris to be that of an industrious simple man, without method or much judgment. "The haste with which he worked is too perceptible; the adventures are told without connection; you find long stories of Tristan followed by adventures of his father Meliadus." For the latter derangement of historical sequence we find a quaint and ingenuous apology offered in Rustician's epilogue to Giron le Courtois:--

"Cy fine le Maistre Rusticien de Pise son conte en louant et regraciant le Pere le Filz et le Saint Esperit, et ung mesme Dieu, Filz de la Benoiste Vierge Marie, de ce qu'il m'a done grace, sens, force, et memoire, temps et lieu, de me mener a fin de si haulte et si n.o.ble matiere come ceste-cy dont j'ay traicte les faiz et proesses recitez et recordez a mon livre. Et se aucun me demandoit pour quoy j'ay parle de Tristan avant que de son pere le Roy Meliadus, le respons que ma matiere n'estoist pas congneue. Car je ne puis pas scavoir tout, ne mettre toutes mes paroles par ordre. Et ainsi fine mon conte. Amen."[9]

In a pa.s.sage of these compilations the Emperor Charlemagne is asked whether in his judgment King Meliadus or his son Tristan were the better man? The Emperor's answer is: "I should say that the King Meliadus was the better man, and I will tell you why I say so. As far as I can see, everything that Tristan did was done for Love, and his great feats would never have been done but under the constraint of Love, which was his spur and goad. Now that never can be said of King Meliadus! For what deeds he did, he did them not by dint of Love, but by dint of his strong right arm.

Purely out of his own goodness he did good, and not by constraint of Love." "It will be seen," remarks on this Paulin Paris, "that we are here a long way removed from the ordinary principles of Round Table Romances.

And one thing besides will be manifest, viz., that Rusticien de Pise was no Frenchman!"[10]

The same discretion is shown even more prominently in a pa.s.sage of one of his compilations, which contains the romances of Arthur, Gyron, and Meliadus (No. 6975--see last note but one):--

"No doubt," Rustician says, "other books tell the story of the Queen Ginevra and Lancelot differently from this; and there were certain pa.s.sages between them of which the Master, in his concern for the honour of both those personages, will say not a word." Alas, says the French Bibliographer, that the copy of Lancelot, which fell into the hands of poor Francesca of Rimini, was not one of those _expurgated_ by our worthy friend Rustician![11]

[Sidenote: Ident.i.ty of the Romance Compiler with Polo's fellow-prisoner.]

41. A question may still occur to an attentive reader as to the ident.i.ty of this Romance-compiler Rusticien de Pise with the Messire _Rustacians de Pise_, of a solitary MS. of Polo's work (though the oldest and most authentic), a name which appears in other copies as _Rusta Pisan, Rasta Pysan, Rustichelus Civis Pisa.n.u.s, Rustico, Restazio da Pisa, Stazio da Pisa_, and who is stated in the preamble to have acted as the Traveller's scribe at Genoa.

M. Pauthier indeed[12] a.s.serts that the French of the MS. Romances of Rusticien de Pise is of the same barbarous character as that of the early French MS. of Polo's Book to which we have just alluded, and which we shall show to be the nearest presentation of the work as originally dictated by the Traveller. The language of the latter MS. is so peculiar that this would be almost perfect evidence of the ident.i.ty of the writers, if it were really the fact. A cursory inspection which I have made of two of those MSS. in Paris, and the extracts which I have given and am about to give, do not, however, by any means support M. Pauthier's view. Nor would that view be consistent with the judgment of so competent an authority as Paulin Paris, implied in his calling Rustician a _nom recommandable_ in old French literature, and his speaking of him as "versed in the secrets of the French Romance Tongue."[13] In fact the difference of language in the two cases would really be a difficulty in the way of identification, if there were room for doubt. This, however, Paulin Paris seems to have excluded finally, by calling attention to the peculiar formula of preamble which is common to the Book of Marco Polo and to one of the Romance compilations of Rusticien de Pise.