MARCO POLO

Il testo del Devisement dou monde (o Milione, secondo la tradizione italiana) trasmesso dal codice parigino fr. 1116 rappresenta la forma linguisticamente più vicina alla superficie discorsiva originale dell’opera poliana. Dopo l’edizione del 2010 Mario Eusebi ne ha rivisto la lezione: il frutto di tale revisione (già disponibile al lettore nell’edizione digitale di Dei viaggi di Messer Marco Polo di Giovanni Battista Ramusio, in questa collana, vol. 5) torna alla tradizionale forma-libro, accompagnato dal glossario integrale e dagli indici dei nomi e dei toponimi, curati da Eugenio Burgio.

After the 2010 edition (Il manoscritto della Bibliothèque Nationale de France fr. 1116, Rome-Padua: Editrice Antenore), Mario Eusebi reviewed the text of the Franco-Venetian redaction (F) of the Devisement dou monde (in collaboration with Eugenio Burgio and Samuela Simion). The result of this revision has long been available to the reader in the digital edition of Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Dei viaggi di Messer Marco Polo (Simion, Burgio 2015): here the text goes back to the traditional book-form; the second volume, already promised in the subtitle of the 2010 edition, is dedicated to the full glossary and indexes (names and toponyms), edited by Eugenio Burgio (with a linguistic note by Mario Eusebi).

In the thirteenth century, Italian merchant and explorer Marco Polo traveled from Venice to the far reaches of Asia, a journey he chronicled in a narrative titled Il Milione, later known as The Travels of Marco Polo. While Polo’s writings would go on to inspire the likes of Christopher Columbus, scholars have long debated their veracity. Some have argued that Polo never even reached China, while others believe that he came as far as the Americas. Now, there’s new evidence for this historical puzzle: a very curious collection of fourteen little-known maps and related documents said to have belonged to the family of Marco Polo himself.

In The Mysteries of the Marco Polo Maps, historian of cartography Benjamin B. Olshin offers the first credible book-length analysis of these artifacts, charting their course from obscure origins in the private collection of Italian-American immigrant Marcian Rossi in the 1930s; to investigations of their authenticity by the Library of Congress, J. Edgar Hoover, and the FBI; to the work of the late cartographic scholar Leo Bagrow; to Olshin’s own efforts to track down and study the Rossi maps, all but one of which are in the possession of Rossi’s great-grandson Jeffrey Pendergraft. Are the maps forgeries, facsimiles, or modernized copies? Did Marco Polo’s daughters—whose names appear on several of the artifacts—preserve in them geographic information about Asia first recorded by their father? Or did they inherit maps created by him? Did Marco Polo entrust the maps to Admiral Ruggero Sanseverino, who has links to Rossi’s family line? Or, if the maps have no connection to Marco Polo, who made them, when, and why?

Medieval writing is rich with stories of travelers: pilgrims en route to Rome or Compostela, knights returning from battle, merchants en route to urban markets. This course examines several medieval literary genres, including travelogues, romances, and spiritual allegories, that narrate journeys and articulate geographical knowledge in sophisticated ways. Throughout the course, students examine the complex investments of medieval narratives in spatial thought and explore how constructions of space are essential to representations of authorial subjectivity and of spiritual and national communities. The first module of the course focuses on allegorical pilgrimages and dream visions and explores how enclosed spaces provide an opportunity for internal " travel " within static confines. What are the roles of memory and mnemonic technologies in allegory, and what social and devotional meanings are best conveyed through the allegory's " veil " ? The second module explores the relationship between romance and space. We will consider how the landscapes of romance (forests, groves, wastelands) develop political and spiritual themes in works such as Floris and Blancheflour and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The third module focuses on medieval travel writing, including Mandeville's Travels and the Book of Margery Kempe. We will discuss how gendered experiences of embodied travel add to our understanding of the social institutions which sought to define and regulate geographical movement. Course requirements will include: approximately 200-250 pages of reading per week, weekly responses papers, a class presentation, and a final research paper and proposal.

Among the unsolved issues in Marco Polo’s Devisement Du Monde, the location and toponym of Ghinghin talas (variants: Chinchin talas, Ginchin talas, Chingin talas etc.) where produced Salamander (asbestos) cannot be identified yet. With a stone stele unearthed in Beijing北京 in the 1980s, this paper would like to shed some new light on Marco Polo’s description.
First, we can identify Marco Polo’s holy napkin (sudarium) of Jesus Christ as the Veil of Veronica preserved in the Old St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome during the 13th to 16th century, as according to Polo, the sudarium was put in a piece of salamander cloth, on which there was a passage: “Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram edificabo ecclesiam meam”, which must indicate the Old St. Peter’s Basilica. Thus it might prove Marco’s claim that Nicolau and Maffeo brought the cloth to Rome from the Grand Qaan when they headed home in about 1265-1266.
Second, if Marco saw with his own eyes or heard from a Turkic baron named Çulficar about the production of salamader, it must have happened in 1271-1291.
At last, the Yuanshi 《元史》(History of the Yuan) recorded that the Yuan court edicted an order in 1267 to mine asbestos in the Bié-qiè-chì (*Bäkäči) Mountain别怯赤山, which has been the only contemprory evidence for Marco’s description. The inscription of the  stele provides us the biography of Gao Xin高信 (1219-1288) who spent half his life as vice director of the Yiyang Ju “extraordinary patterns bureau” 异样局, which was established to manage the production of royal textiles for the Yuan court. According to the inscription, this bureau produced the “fire-washing dragon-bearded fairy clothes”火浣龙须布仙裳 (i.e. clothes made of asbestos) presumably at some time between 1261 and 1288, which then could serve as a precious contemprory evidence for Marco Polo’s narratives.
All above demonstrate the knowledge, mining and use of asbestos under Qublai’s reign and the spread of accurate knowledge from East to West. Before long, the Yuan probably lost the asbetos mine because of the war against the Mongol princes in Central Asia. The knowledge of asbestos was lost into fable again among both Chinese and Europeans.

This book is part of a four volume box published at the occasion of the Erasmus Prize 2008, won by Ian Buruma.
It contains reproductions of all the 90 illustrated folios of one of the most beautiful and well known manuscripts of Marco Polo’s "Book on the Miracles of the World" (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, français 2810) and detailed explanatory descriptions on these miniatures, as well as information on the historical background. The book also contains a 45 page introduction on Marco Polo, his book, and travelling in the Middle Ages.

Marco Polo’s Boek over de wonderen van de wereld. Toelichtingen bij de miniaturen, de tekst en de historische achtergronden aan de hand van 86 folio’s van het handschrift van het Livre des merveilles van Marco Polo bewaard in de Bibliothèque nationale de France te Parijs (manuscrit français 2810) door Jan de Klerk en Hanno Wijsman, met een inleiding en een nawoord over het handschrift en de historische context door Hanno Wijsman,
’s-Hertogenbosch (Stichting Erasmusfestival) & Louvain (Peeters), 2008.
243 pages; 100 colour illustrations

The travels of Venetian merchant Marco Polo (lived 1254-1324, traveled 1271-1293) captivated readers when his book was published c. 1300. At the time, most Europeans traveled very little, so Polo’s descriptions of Armenia, Baghdad, Tabriz, Persia, Kashmir, the Desert of Lop, Karakoram, and Shangdu (Xanadu) tantalized his audience. Over seven hundred years later, Marco Polo’s tale remains exciting for would-be adventurers and instructive for historians and other scholars. Polo’s travels brought him into contact with various cultures that make up what we refer to today as the Middle East. In addition, he traveled eastward beyond the Middle East into India and China, lands anciently connected to the West by the Silk Road, yet still mysterious to most Westerners. Polo was but one of many medieval European travelers, yet certainly the most famous, to venture through what we now consider the Middle East to the Far East during the thirteenth century, helping to create an important cultural connection between the West and the East, with the Middle East as the bridge.

Que Christophe Colomb soit parti chercher le grand-khan en Amérique est un thème bien connu, presque une évidence. Le sujet semble facile: le marin génois avait trouvé l’idée dans la lecture du Devisement du monde de Marco Polo, qui raconte comment le petit-fils de Gengis Khan, Qubilai, devenu le grand khan mongol régnant sur la Chine, montrait ses faveurs au christianisme porté par le voyageur vénitien. Idée erronée, mais transmise à presque deux siècles de distance d’un voyageur à un autre, et qui eut pour effet inattendu la découverte du continent américain. Certes, en 1492, cela faisait tout de même plus d’un siècle que les Mongols avaient été chassés de Chine, laissant la place en 1368 à une dynastie, les Ming, bien moins ouverte aux contacts avec l’étranger. De plus, si l’on n’y regarde de plus près, il n’est même pas vraiment sûr que Christophe Colomb ait bien lu le Devisement du monde avant de s’embarquer. La question de la transmission de la figure historique et littéraire d’un grand-khan du Cathay favorable au christianisme reste donc plus compliquée qu’elle n’en a l’air. Elle relève d’une représentation générale du monde, diffusée à travers l’ensemble des élites occidentales de l’époque, capable de mobiliser au service de la découverte et de l’expansion. Et c’est en ce sens que l’histoire de la transmission de cette figure de Marco Polo à Christophe Colomb mérite que l’on s’y arrête: la réécriture permanente à travers la littérature latine de ce thème, deux siècles encore après la mort de Qubilai qui l’avait inspiré, est un révélateur des ressorts profonds de la conception du monde de l’Occident médiéval finissant.

En 1206 Chinggis Khan comenzaba la construcción del mayor continuo político, económico y cultural del que ha quedado constancia en la historia de la humanidad. Ningún otro estado había conseguido jamás penetrar tantos pueblos y lenguas distintas. A su influencia no escapó nada del Viejo Mundo y a su influencia se deben también las condiciones que hicieron posible el descubrimiento del Nuevo. Todo esto bastaría para reservar a los Chinggis, Ogodei y Qubilai Khan un puesto de honor en la memoria. Pero los mongoles son un pueblo extraño, sin duda en la última frontera de la alteridad para nosotros los sedentarios. Afortunadamente, este postrero asalto del mundo nómada coincidió con el gran desarrollo de la cultura escrita en China, Persia y el Occidente latino. El Imperio mongol constituye por eso una de las experiencias históricas más remotas y singulares a las que el método historiográfico garantiza un nivel de acceso aceptable.
La presente obra, la primera en su género escrita en castellano, aborda la historia del Imperio mongol en toda su extensión espacial y temporal, si bien privilegiando una perspectiva narrativa y situando en su centro a los personajes, con el anhelo de facilitar al lector moderno su tránsito por una experiencia histórica radicalmente distinta pero, a la vez, fundacional como pocas del mundo contemporáneo.


Puede consultarlo en el siguiente link:
https://www.sintesis.com/temas%20de%20historia%20medieval-298/el%20imperio%20mongol-ebook-2430.html

Este artigo analisa o 26º episódio da primeira temporada da série "O túnel do tempo", de 1968, em que os personagens Doug Phillips e Tony Newman são lançados no meio de uma batalha entre forças rivais do Império Mongol, nos finais do século XIII e encontram Marco Polo.

Este libro analiza los viajes comerciales de Marco Polo y las representaciones culturales e imaginarias que se construyen sobre Oriente durante la Edad Media. De forma particular, se estudian los objetos materiales, especias y maravillas, como también las representaciones e imágenes que forja la sociedad occidental, las que impulsan la expansión comercial y desarrollan una visión exótica y maravillosa de las tierras, objetos y recursos de Oriente.

Il testamento del 1319 di Agnese, di cui si fornisce l’edizione commentata, costituisce un frammento sparso nel vasto (e ancora in espansione) insieme documentario sulla famiglia veneziana dei Polo. La sua importanza si sostanzia nel fatto che la testatrice potrebbe essere una figlia di Marco Polo il Viaggiatore avuta prima del matrimonio con Donata Badoer dal quale, come noto, nacquero Fantina, Bellela e Moreta.

Il vol. comprende:  A. Bisanti-A. Casamento, Premessa (pp. VII-XII); 1. C. Rotolo, Truculento: le suggestioni di un enigma (pp. 1-17); 2. M.M. Bianco, La toga del "facundus" Afranio (pp. 19-35); 3. V. Bonsangue, Se anche Crasso impallidisce. Emotività e razionalizzazione della paura in Cic. Caec. 41-42 (pp. 37-52); 4. I. Tondo, Rose, corone e profumi. Sul ritratto di Verre in Cicerone (nota a Verr. 2, 5,27) (pp. 53-68); 5. Alfredo Casamento, Questioni di guerra. La sezione «De bellis» nel XVIII libro delle «Etymologiae» di Isidoro di Siviglia (pp. 69-84); 6. A. Bisanti, Sul carme 35 (Ad Mathildem reginam) di Ildeberto di Lavardin (pp. 85-114); 7. A. Grisafi, Il «Milione» in America. Da Marco Polo a Cristoforo Colombo... attraverso Pipino da Bologna (pp. 115-131) - Indice degli studiosi moderni (pp. 133-136).
N.B. - L'allegato file PDF comprende soltanto il frontespizio del vol., la Premessa e l'Indice.

When Europeans first landed in Japan they encountered people they perceived as white-skinned and highly civilized, but these impressions did not endure. Gradually the Europeans' positive impressions faded away and Japanese were seen as yellow-skinned and relatively inferior. Accounting for this dramatic transformation, From White to Yellow is a pioneering study of the evolution of European interpretations of the Japanese and the emergence of discourses about race in early modern Europe. Transcending the conventional focus on Africans and Jews within the rise of modern racism, Rotem Kowner demonstrates that the invention of race did not emerge in a vacuum in eighteenth-century Europe, but rather was a direct product of earlier discourses of the "Other." This compelling study indicates that the racial discourse on the Japanese, alongside the Chinese, played a major role in the rise of the modern concept of race. While challenging Europe's self-possession and sense of centrality, the discourse delayed the eventual consolidation of a hierarchical worldview in which Europeans stood immutably at the apex. Drawing from a vast array of primary sources, From White to Yellow traces the racial roots of the modern clash between Japan and the West.


ENDORSEMENTS
“This magisterial work by Rotem Kowner fills an important gap in contemporary scholarship about racial history and European perceptions of the Japanese during the age of maritime explorations, beginning with the voyages of Marco Polo. The author approaches a delicate and complex topic with a breadth of knowledge and erudition based on the careful analysis of primary documents from a wide variety of both printed and manuscript sources in numerous languages.”
M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J. Director of the Ricci Institute, University of San Francisco

“Rotem Kowner has written an extraordinary book which will be must-reading for anyone interested in Western perceptions of the Japanese from the beginning (Marco Polo’s account) to the 18th century, and to anyone interested in the history of the very concept of ‘race.’"
Gary Leupp, Department of History, Tufts University

“Erudite, comprehensive, and clearly-written, From White to Yellow offers the reader a panorama of the Euro-Japanese encounter in the pre-modern period that is unsurpassed in previous scholarship.”
Ronnie Hsia, Department of History, Pennsylvania State University


REVIEWS
“This is a path-breaking book, rich in insights and extraordinary well researched. ... This is a dense book, exhaustive in its treatment of European writings on Japan and duly aware of the need to keep in mind how Europeans wrote about Others. There are fascinating explorations of topics such as slavery, miscegenation, and George Psalmanazar, the self-styled Japanese. … [T]he text of this volume covers only slightly more than half of the pages and most of the rest is taken up by endnotes, many of them as long as a paragraph and some filling half a page, together with a huge bibliography covering works in twelve languages. Not only do the notes testify to the prodigious labor that has gone into this book, but they also show how meticulously Kowner has explored the ramifications and details of encounters between Europeans and the various Others they encountered. … This book is, though, unsurpassed in its careful examination of European writings on Japan, and the efficient index makes Kowner’s analyses and coverage of the literature easily accessible”
Peter Kornicki, Journal of World History 27 (2016): 347–350

“From White to Yellow is a big book in every way. The product of immense research, it is an exceptionally ambitious work that makes a string of innovative and far-reaching arguments. Even more strikingly, it is simply the first of a planned two-volume series that, once completed, will span over six hundred years of European interactions with Japan. ... The scale of the task and the depth of the research invite a comparison to Donald Lach’s Asia in the Making of Europe, a groundbreaking series that can best be described as an almost supernatural feat of scholarship. … Overall the work is a significant achievement that should be read by anyone working in the field. It moves Japan from the margins to the very center of discussions over the development of early modern racial discourse, making a powerful case for the importance of the European encounter with Japan. Japan represented a problem for Europeans, and Kowner brilliantly dissects the varied ways in which they struggled to deal with it in the early modern period.”
Adam Clulow, Monumenta Nipponica 71 (2016): 140–143

“The book is a remarkable scholarly achievement and in some ways almost too detailed in its exposition. It throws valuable light on evolving European attitudes to race and to racial hierarchies and demonstrates how they were filtered through different social mechanisms – religion, trade, power – and how despite empirical evidence, few Europeans could actually ‘see’ racial differences in the case of the Japanese, even depicting their clothing in a quasi-European style in paintings and engravings. … Kowner’s book is the outcome of years of scholarly investigation in many languages including Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Latin, Spanish, German, English and yet others and is exhaustively documented with fully half of its almost 700 pages being devoted to sources, notes and bibliography. Its essential theme is the tracing of the transformation and images that slowly moved the Japanese from being seen as ‘white race’ to re-classification as a ‘yellow’ one, along it may be said with the Chinese and the Koreans, whose racial history in relation to the West is inevitably part of the larger story of the transformation of perceptions as they applied to East Asia as a whole, and the light that this sheds on the roots of racial and racialist thought in the West. ….”
John Clammer, Ethnic and Racial Studies 39 (2016): 1500–1502

“In this erudite, complex, and ambitious work, Rotem Kowner examines how Europeans came to see the Japanese nation as “yellow” and inferior, after initially perceiving them as “white” equals. ... Kowner’s work complicates the history of the construction and development of the idea of race by examining the European encounter with the Japanese, whom Europeans initially found different but not culturally or materially inferior  ... A short review cannot do justice to Kowner’s rich, multilayered work. The concluding chapter offers a prologue for the forthcoming second volume, which will examine how the Japanese were relegated to inferiority in the eighteenth century, and how a virulently racial discourse ensued.”
Robert Entenmann, Journal of Jesuit Studies (2016): 132–134.

"It is an unsurpassable analysis redolent of superb scholarship. In the end, Kowner makes a strong case that, from 1300 to 1735, Europeans slowly arrived at a system that enabled them to present a universal hierarchical taxonomy of humankind--based on rudimentary notions of race--with themselves at its apex. ... From White to Yellow does help us to understand ''the mechanisms that govern[ed] the rise and evolution of the concept of race in early modern times.'' In doing so, it richly expands our perspective on the origins of race and racism." Nam-lin Hur, University of Toronto Quarterly 85:3 (2016): 533-534.

“Kowner’s work is unique in that, unlike the majority of studies that focus on race in East Asia, it aims to elucidate the emergence of these distinctions at a much earlier point in Euro-Japanese relations—in fact, from their origin, if such can be found. … Focusing on the five centuries between Marco Polo’s first report of a mysterious island called Cipangu and Linnaeus’s categorization of the Japanese as a “yellow” race in 1735, Kowner builds a compelling argument that traces the development of racism from Europeans’ earliest imaginings of the Japanese people to the heart of Enlightenment thought. ... From Yellow to White is also notable for the breadth of its source materials, which, despite spanning several languages and centuries, are housed within a sound and well-organized theoretical framework; I can think of many other works that attempt to do the same but lack the clarity found here. The discussion of Japanese slavery, which tends to be a less-discussed topic in Japanese historiography, as well as of the cultural similarities between Japanese and their European observers, receive remarkably nuanced treatments as points of comparison between Japan and other countries within Europe’s purview. This work is therefore both timely and adds something new to the contemporary debate on the birth of race in Western thought.”
Christina Ghanbarpour, Itinerario 40 (2016): 318–320


TABLE OF CONTENTS
Figures xi
Note on Translations and Conventions xv
Acknowledgments xix
Preface xxiii
Introduction 3

PHASE ONE SPECULATION: Pre-Encounter Knowledge of the Japanese (1300-1543) 33
1 The Emergence of “Cipangu” and Its Precursory Ethnography 35
2 The “Cipanguese” at the Opening of the Age of Discovery 50

PHASE TWO OBSERVATION: A Burgeoning Discourse of Initial Encounters (1543-1640) 65
3 Initial Observations of the Japanese 67
4 The Japanese Position in Contemporary Hierarchies 101
5 Concrete Mirrors of a New Human Order 143
6 “Race” and Its Cognitive Limits during the Phase of Observation 181

PHASE THREE RECONSIDERATION: Antecedents of a Mature Discourse (1640-1735) 201
7 Dutch Reappraisal of the Japanese Body and Origins 209
8 Power, Status, and the Japanese Position in the Global Order 224
9 In Search of a New Taxonomy: Botany, Medicine, and the Japanese 251
10 “Race” and Its Perceptual Limits during the Phase of Reconsideration 283

Conclusion: The Discourse of Race in Early Modern Europe and the Japanese Case 309

Notes 345
Bibliography 511
Index 617

Фундаментальный труд выдающегося русского ботаника, синолога, историка, историографа, источниковеда, географа и путешественника Эмилия Васильевича Бретшнейдера (1833–1901) посвящен истории и геоuрафии Центральной Азии и Восточного Туркестана в эпоху средневековья. Эта книга – замечательный памятник отечественного востоковедения, она стоит в одном ряду с работами Н.Я. Бичурина (Иакинфа), П.И. Кафарова (Палладия), В.П. Васильева, Б.Я. Владимирцова, В.В. Бартольда, Г.Е. Грум-Гржимайло и других ученых этого круга. И если переводы приводимых автором китайских, монгольских и персидских письменных источников в настоящее время устарели, его историко-географические комментарии к ним продолжают сохранять ценность. На русском языке данное исследование издается впервые.

The Assassins of Alamut are presented in popular media and academic studies as the 11th century forerunners of today's "suicide terrorists"---thus producing a genealogy of spectacular Middle Eastern suicide-homicides that stretches back some 900 years.

"Sex, Lies, and Paradise" analyzes accretions of stories about the Assassins: to see how the Assassins got their name, were believed to anticipate an Islamic paradise in the afterlife, and came to represent for the West a volatile nexus of sex and violence.

This effort of literary archeology considers both eastern and western fabulations, and examines in particular how two popular, widely-circulating European texts---Marco Polo's Travels, and Mandeville's Travels---were key in shaping western understanding.

The article begins and ends by reflecting on the stakes involved---today, and in the past.

Özet Günümüzde rakabetin farklı bir boyut kazandığını kabul eden şirketler, rakipleri karşısında bir adım öne çıkabilmek için geleneksel maliyet stratejileri yerine farklı arayışlar içine girmeye başlamışlardır. Ekonomik, sosyal ve çevre faktörlerinin aynı anda sağlanması ile oluşan sürdürülebilirlik kavramı, biliçlenen tüketici profilinin şirketlerde görmek istediği yeni bir kavramdır. Bu çalışmada, üretim sektöründen sonra çevreye en büyük etkisi olan lojistik sektörünün daha sürdürülebilir bir çevre için yaptığı faaliyetlerin uygulamaları irdelenmiştir. Abstract The corporates whose accept the competition has formed different ways in today's world, started to looking for differentiated strategies instead of traditional cost strategies to highlighted theirselves. The consept of sustainability which have to povides the factors of economical, social and enviromental also intended to see by the consumers whose being aware of. In this study, tended to explicates to more sustainable environment by logistics which more efective to the environment after production. Üniversite Caddesi, No:37-39, Ağaçlı Yol, 35100 Bornova / İZMİR Tel : (0232) 411 5373 Fax : (0232) 374 5474 E – Posta : demirr.pinar@gmail.com 1.Giriş

El presente estudio efectúa una revisión al fenómeno de los viajes, analizando su concepto y simbolismo a fines de la Edad Media. La investigación analiza al viajero y los otros, comprendiendo la ambigüedad conceptual que se forja en torno a las otras culturas. Asimismo, se estudia los viajes y lo maravilloso, dando cuenta del carácter sobrenatural que adquiere la realidad y sus criaturas. Por otro lado, se revisa la concepción del espacio, analizando los lugares reales, simbólicos e imaginados en la ruta a Oriente. El estudio considera como fuentes los relatos de viajes de Marco Polo y John Mandeville, como también, algunos bestiarios medievales de los siglos XIII y XIV. Finalmente, se comprende el viaje como una multiplicidad de desplazamientos, creando una nueva actitud e imagen en torno a lo otro y desconocido, dando cuenta de las maravillas del nuevo mundo y, generando a su vez una relación ambigua entre el viajero, el nuevo espacio y sus gentes.

Between Marco Polo’s Divisament dou Monde and the enigmatic Book of John Mandeville, an important transformation in ethnographic language took place, one that blended the universalistic idiom of nature and natural law with the assessment of cultural diversity. This article elucidates the reasons behind this transformation by referring to the context in which these two key works were created. Marco Polo’s language combined his spontaneous observations – largely influenced by his familiarity with Persian and Turko-Mongol cultures – with the rhetorical techniques of Rusticello of Pisa, who popularized Arthurian romances. By contrast, John Mandeville, who read works by the likes of Vincent of Beauvais and Brunetto Latini, introduced to vernacular geography a
number of notions related to natural philosophy and scholastic theology.The concept of nature was crucial in this respect, making it possible (among other things) to rationalize idolatry and propose a different account of religious universalism and tolerance. Whereas Marco Polo – who was fascinated by the ways in which different laws, religions, and customs seemed to make sense in different societies – ultimately relied on the capacity of religion to channel magical or supernatural powers,
the author of The Book of John Mandeville developed a vision of Christian moral reform based on the idea that natural law was truly universal, and thus the foundation, both rational and Adamic, upon which Christian grace could rest.

Marco Polo transcribió fonéticamente los nombres de los personajes, ciudades, provincias y parajes naturales que visitó. Los mismos son reproducidos de manera diferente según el texto que utilicemos o la lengua a la que fueron traducidos. A pesar de ello, numerosos estudios realizados sobre su periplo nos permiten identificar y localizar la mayor parte de ellos. Para una mejor ubicación de los mismos, recogemos los nombres actuales entre paréntesis.

¿Y si el libro de Marco Polo debiera su aparición a un renovado interés por la Cruzada, a la posibilidad de establecer contacto con la retaguardia del Islam y la obtención así de la supremacía del Occidente latino sobre otras comunidades imaginadas, pero debiera su fama y extraordinaria difusión precisamente a su capacidad de cuestionar los fundamentos de dicha aspiración? Esta aparente paradoja viene analizada en la presente obra con la ayuda de otros textos contemporáneos de viajes al Lejano Oriente que describen un movimiento similar entre la aquiescencia con formas tradicionales de poder y la resistencia a esas mismas fuerzas en tanto percibidas como contingentes y mudables. La trasgresión de antiguas convenciones sociales y literarias, así como la capacidad de estimular en el lector un ejercicio introspectivo equivalente fue uno de los pilares de la extraordinaria fama conseguida por libros como el de Marco Polo. Pero lo que hace de este fenómeno literario algo realmente significativo es precisamente su íntima relación con los deseos del papa romano y los principales reyes latinos de ampliar y proyectar su domino sobre el mundo entero. Significativo porque tiene la facultad de mostrar como la unilateral expansión hacia fuera de Europa fue acompañada desde su origen por esta otra energía implosiva y reversible que amplió enormemente el área de exposición a iniciativas marginales e influencias extranjeras, mucho más esquivas y difíciles de detectar pero igualmente decisivas en la constitución del mundo actual, moderno y globalizado.

As the first European to claim that he travelled to China and back, Marco Polo is a celebrated traveller who described the multicultural society of Eurasia in the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries ad. However, his famed account, the Travels of Marco Polo, contains many unsolved mysteries which have generated discussion among historians, while an archaeological approach has been even less convincing because the material that may link to Marco Polo is very rare. A recent re-analysis of Chinese ceramics from a wide geographical area ranging from southern China to the Indian Ocean provides some archaeological support: it suggests that a Chinese porcelain jar housed in the Treasury of San Marco in Venice dates to the era of Marco Polo and is associated with his journey to China.

I analyze the toponyms for places in China which derive directly or indirectly from Chinese originals, via one or more non-Chinese originals. By analyzing certain features, I conclude that they are not consistent, but the majority of them seem to be derived from Yuan-era Chinese via Mongolian. I conclude with an appendix that gives solutions to several hitherto not adequately solved toponyms, such as Caiciu and the related stories, *Cuncian (or Cuncon), and Vuguen.

This paper was delivered at a conference in September, 2015, in Yangzhou. A Chinese translation will be published in the conference volume.

Throughout history there are many examples of fantastic creatures and places. By understanding the history of monstrous races it is possible to explain the role they have served in the past to explain the “otherness” of the unknown, as well as, to demonstrate the influences these ideas had in the development of medieval and modern ideas about race and society.

On appelle « Bible de Marco Polo » une petite bible portative (Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. III caps. 1) qui a été transportée en Chine au XIVe siècle, peut-être par des missionnaires franciscains, et a été retrouvée et ramenée en Europe trois siècles plus tard par le jésuite Philippe Couplet. L’article situe ce manuscrit, qui a été fabriqué vraisemblablement à Paris vers 1230-1250,  dans le contexte plus large de la production de bibles portatives au XIIIe siècle.

Goal of this project was editing the medieval German version of Marco Polo’s Devisement dou Monde (version DI). On the basis of the stemmatic hypothesis formulated for this edition project, three of the extant witnesses were considered to have the highest stemmatic weight: these were transcribed and edited. The methodology was compliant with state-of-the-art digital practice, but also presented major innovations, such as the use of computational methods consisting in XProc pipelines for the generation of multiple edition levels. For the dispositio, a customised version of the EVT web app was produced, to grant dynamic access to the multidimensionality of the editorial project, modelled to account for the multi-faceted nature of text. A prototype of the edition is already available at <dh.uni-wuppertal.de/test-evt-di-edition/>. Considering the reception of DI, some hypotheses were formulated on the fruition of the text in the German Middle Ages. Notably, the study of the reception of DI benefited from the textual evidence found in a codex containing a printed exemplar of DI which had never been mentioned before in the literature on Marco Polo. Finally, the toponymic variance of DI represented the basis of a collaborative digital study on the geographical knowledge of Marco Polo’s medieval readers.

https://journals.openedition.org/emscat/4925

The so-called ovoo-cairns of Mongolia display a variety and pervasiveness that stimulated a rich anthropological analysis. However, their ancient history remains a challenging and scarcely frequented research topic. This paper introduces an archaeological focus combined with linguistic, historical, anthropological considerations to provide an alternative approach to the genealogy of the ovoos. Their multi-dimensional nature and persistent temporal aspects are investigated through the analysis of early written sources, local narratives, and the archaeological landscape. This is to substantiate the hypothesis that the origin of ovoos could lie far deeper in time than the Buddhist intensification of the 16th and 17th centuries. It could be connected with the ancient monumental tradition of piling (stone) objects in significant places of the sacred and pastoral landscapes of Mongolia. In particular, the possible intersection between present cairns and ancient funerary monumentality is investigated, taking into account three specific case studies of Late Prehistoric mounds that have been locally transformed into ovoos in the area of the Ih Bogd Mountain, in southern Mongolia (Bayanhongor Province). The “ovoo phenomenon” emerges as an exciting opportunity to analyse how people materially engage with and negotiate the local past within the landscape both in ancient and present times.

Kubilay’ın zamanında Moğol İmparatorluğu dört parçaya bölünmüştü. Kubilay Han Çin’i, Mançurya, Güney Sibirya, Kore ve Moğolistan’ı bizzat yönetiyordu. Tibet, Hindi Çin’in kuzey ve doğusu, ve Hindistan dahil Güneydoğu Asya’nın büyük kısmı onun etkisi altındaydı. Görüldüğü gibi Kubilay Han’ın Avrupa ile doğrudan sınır bağlantısı yoktu, ancak İran hükümdarları Kubilay’a göre onun uzak bölgelerde yer alan valileriydi, kısmen özerk olan bölgelerin hanlarıydı. Onların iç meselelerine doğrudan müdahale edebiliyor ve doğrudan veya dolaylı yoldan onları etkiliyordu.
İç işlerde bağımsız olan bu uzak akrabalar, en azından Kubilay ölene kadar Moğolistan’daki ulu hakanın yönetimini tartışmıyordu. Bu yüzden Kubilay Han döneminde yaşanan Moğol-Batı siyasi ilişkilerini Batı halkları ile doğrudan temasta bulunan İlhanlı hükümdarları üzerinden değerlendirmek doğru olacaktır. Makalemizde Kubilay devrinden önce İran Moğollarını Avrupa ile yakınlaştırmaya iten gelişmelere değinilecek, daha sonra Kubilay döneminde İran’da ilhanlık yapan hükümdarların devrinde Avrupa ile kurulan temaslardan bahsedilecektir.
Ancak Moğol-Batı ilişkileri yalnızca Yakın Doğu’da vuku bulmamıştır. Moğol İmparatorluğu’nun ana topraklarında da özellikle din yoluyla iki kesim arasında cereyan eden gelişmeler yaşanmıştır. Bu yüzden İran’daki gelişmelerin yanı sıra Uzak Doğu’da, özellikle Kubilay’ın sarayında Batı ile olan yakınlaşmalara ve temaslara da makalemizde değinilecektir.

This brief article depends on the book written by B.B. OLSHIN, The Mysteries of the Marco Polo Maps, Chicago - London, UP, 2014, and «spoke of a certain “Filomeno Emanuele Marciano Rossi” who had emigrated from Italy to America in the nineteenth century and possessed those maps […] He had been born in a place called Baia e Latina, a town north of Naples, in 1869».

The manuscript BnF fr. 1116 (F) is the best surviving witness of the Devisement dou monde both for the quality of its reading and because it offers the closest version to the original form of the text. The book was written by Marco Polo, who had travelled for 24 years in Asia in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, and Rustichello da Pisa, an Arthurian romance writer, while both were prisoners in Genoa in 1298. The language in which the work was first written – an Old French heavily sprinkled with morphological as well as lexical Italianisms – is considered as a representative example of «Franco-Italian». The great heterogeneity of the texts usually included within this category, however, might provide an incorrect impression as regards both the original linguistic form of the Devisement and the audience to whom it was originally addressed. The language of the ms. BnF fr. 1116 does not display strong similarities to the hybrid language used in Northern Italy for chivalric literature, which is traditionally called «Franco-Italian» or «Franco-Venetan». Some linguistic correspondences enable us to connect the ms. BnF fr. 1116  with the group of Old French manuscripts copied by Pisan scribes while incarcerated in Genoa prison, following the battle of Meloria (1284). The fragment of the Devisement recently discovered by C. Concina appears to be very similar to F. Both graphic and phonetic evidences suggest that this witness, too, has to be localised to Tuscany.