Okay, a new history item for debate.  I read an article today that
a new book is out making the well documented claim that Marco Polo,
that great explorer, lied about most of his exploits.  It says Polo
probably never got further than Constantinople, and never made it
anywyere near China.  The book claims that Polo plagiarized most of
his writings from those of an Islamic writer named Rusticello, with
whom he shared a jail cell in 1296.  It claims pasta came from 
the persians, not the chinese or italians, and that Polo got it from
the Arabs.  

Chief among her points of proof, that Polo in all his descriptions
of China, doesnt mention Chinese handwriting, which is after all much
different than western handwriting.

2 responses total.

I'm not very fresh on MP, but offhand I'd say it's one thing to claim that
*some* or *most* of his descriptions were second hand, or otherwise
crafted into the first person at a later date & leaving some fuzziness as
to exact itinerary.  This technique of assimilation of data is pretty
standard, and probably not hard to suggest in MP's writings (actually
transcriptions of his telling?) or many other historic accounts up to the
present day.  It seems a greater (and more intere$ting) claim to say Marco
Polo spent 18 years (or whatever) in a Constantinople flophouse (or
wherever) supping on cold spaghetti and planning his future on the lecture
circuit.  How many newspapers were there in China along the trade routes
of the 1200's?  The "Chinese text absence" argument doesn't seem like a
proof of anything, and barely cause for supposition.  There must be more
substantial stuff in this book? 

I haven't read this book, but...my encyclopedia entry for Marco Polo
says "...for centuries his book was regarded as a mass of fabrication
and exaggeration. Not until the 19th century did the researches of
French and English scholars prove his veracity."  I also think that
Chinese writing was well known in the west for centuries before Marco
Polo's expeditions. Polo was the first *merchant* that *wrote about
his journeys*, not the first contact between China and the West. 

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