"Do You Imagine That Our Readers

Will Expect Truth?"

or, Marco Polo and Columbia University

CONSUELO W DUTSCHKE

Although modern scholarship has proven Marco Polo's
account of his travels to the East to be trae, both in the
fact of the trip and in many of the details of movement
and event, the common misconception is that only recendy have
we credited Marco Polo with such veracity. Investigations of the
truth of the Travels began in the late nineteenth and early twenti¬
eth centuries. Sinologists discovered correspondences between
cities or events known from Chinese history and those mentioned
by Marco Polo; scholars of ancient Persian found traces of that
language in Marco Polo's terminology; evidence was brought to
light by Christian missionaries of the Nestorian sects of which
Marco had spoken; modern travelers set out in caravan and by
motorcycle to re-trace a route that must have existed at one time.
This accumulated proof came as a surprise to the Western man-
on-the-street who has traditionally taken Marco Polo's recounting
of his travels as a fantasy. But when did these shifts towards rejec¬
tion and then towards a new acceptance occur? What evidence do
we have of these shifts from Marco's tmth to the world's disbelief
and back again to acceptance of his veracity?

Those working from within the literary tradition, as opposed
to those with formal training in history or geography, will recog¬
nize the once-accepted interpretation that Marco Polo's Travels
were a hallucination, an exaggerated and extravagant pack of Ues,
a delusion shared by all participants. Such interpretations refer to
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's opium-entranced "Kubla Khan"
(1797): "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome
decree . . . "; or to Eugene O'Neill's Marco Millions (1923) with its
ironic foreword: "This play is an attempt to render poetic justice
to one long famous as a traveler, unjustly world-renowned as a
 

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