'LA GREIGNEUR MERVEILLE DU MONDE': MARCO POLO AND FRENCH AS A MARKER OF CULTURAL RELATIVITY

Abstract

Marco Polo's Le Divisament dou Monde (1292) had a pan-European dissemination and is one of a select few medieval texts to have enjoyed a continuous readership since the Middle Ages.1 Written in French, but not by a Frenchman, Le Divisament is associated from the outset with marvels, hence one of its alternative titles Le Livre des merveilles. It opens promising an account of ‘les grandes merveilles’ of the world, claiming to tell only ‘la pure verité’ (p. 50). But significantly, Marco's merveilles are remarkably naturalistic, indeed often of human confection in that they are architectural, manufactured objects, or social customs (particularly those of the Great Khan's court).2 This should be read, I suggest, in relation to the presentation of Marco and his family, their devices and customs, as marvellous to the Tartar Other. This notion is introduced early on, in the text's lengthy ‘prologue’, which narrates at a brisk pace, largely in the preterite, the travels to the East of two generations of the Polo family. As is well-known, Marco was absent from Venice (with his father and uncle) from 1271 to 1292, and if some have doubted the authenticity of his account of their travels, this need not effect how the text functions as an invitation to the reader to embark on a fictional journey. Indeed, after the prologue there are no narrative surprises, since we have already been told why the Polos left, where they went, what they did, why they returned. The text then narrates the Polos' peregrinations and deeds in the present, giving the reader the impression of going on a journey with the text. Hence, for example, ‘we’ are reminded periodically of ‘la ou nos sonmes ore’, or where ‘we’ have just been or are about to go. In the context of this reality effect, and the insistent claims of truth that punctuate the entire text, it is significant that the first time we encounter merveilles after the opening paragraph, this is not a wonder of the East, but rather Marco's father and uncle on their first trip to the East: ‘Et quant les messages [emissaries of the Great Khan] virent ces deux freres, si orent grans merveilles, pour ce que onques maiz n'avoient veu nul latin en celle contree’ (p. 54). Thus the paradigm of the Westerners as the source of merveilles is important from the outset.