In Marco Polo and His World, the French medievalist and Marco Polo scholar Sharon Kinoshita offers a lively and holistic view of the famous Venetian merchant and his co-authored text, The Description of the World. As she notes in her acknowledgements (p. 202), Marco Polo and His World is a companion text to her 2016 The Description of the World, a translation of the manuscript known as the “F” text from c. 1310 now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Marco Polo and His World is a success for many reasons, but perhaps the most important is how thoroughly Kinoshita engages with global medieval history by drawing parallels between Marco Polo's lived experiences and those of his contemporaries in China, the Latin West, and the greater Islamic and Persianate worlds. By both focusing on the specific context of Marco Polo's observations and connecting them to the wider world and intellectual production during the medieval period, Kinoshita leaves the reader with a good grasp of Marco Polo's life and text as well as an understanding of the material, cultural, and intellectual connections across Eurasia during his lifetime.
Kinoshita opens the book with a thorough introduction to the state of the field of Marco Polo studies. She includes a clear explanation of the different manuscript copies of the text of The Description of the World that have survived and the ways in which variations within the manuscripts have impacted interpretation and understanding of the text by modern scholars. The original text of The Description of the World was first narrated by Marco Polo to the romance writer Rustichello of Pisa while both men were incarcerated in a Genoese prison in 1298. In the text, Polo described his travels to and from the court of Qubilai Khan in China, and the 17 years he spent in China in the service of the Khan. The original 1298 manuscript was lost, and the “F” text is the closest chronologically to the original. Kinoshita's introduction should be the first stop for anyone with curiosity about Marco Polo as she is able to explain clearly the tangled histories of the various manuscript versions and later translations.
In addition to the introduction the book has five main chapters and an afterword. It also includes a chronology and an annotated bibliography. The chapters “Marco Polo and His World”, “The Book of the Great Khan”, “The Book of Marvels”, “Animal, vegetable, mineral: merchants and their world”, and “Portrait gallery: Marco Polo's contemporaries” delve into aspects of Marco Polo's life and the text of the Description of the World while always incorporating broader cultural context. This is done most radically in the fifth chapter, which departs completely from the life of Marco Polo and instead focuses on the lives of three of his contemporaries, from China, northern India, and Byzantium, respectively, whose paths never crossed with the Venetian merchant.
There are some currents that flow throughout the book, including the themes of diversity and the marvellous, which are found in every chapter. Additionally, groups of three pop up consistently throughout the book: objects, people, cities, and ideas all come in threes. In chapter 1, for example, we find introductions to Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, while in chapter 2 these Italian cities find their parallel in the Chinese/Mongol cities of Khanbaliq (present-day Beijing), Quinsai (present-day Hangzhou), and Zaytun (present-day Quanzhou). In the third chapter we are introduced to three case studies of saints: Saint Thomas, Saints Barlaam and Josaphat (who, Kinoshita explains, were derived from translations of the life of the historical Buddha, referred to here by his Mongol name Sergamoni Borcan), and stories of contemporary saints from The Description of the World (pp. 113–5). The fourth and fifth chapters are structured completely around their chosen groups of three: chapter 4 looks at the categories of animal, vegetable, and mineral to understand the context of commodities during the time of Marco Polo, while the fifth chapter details the lives of the Yuan dynasty scholar official Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), the Delhi sultanate court poet Amīr Khusrau (1253–1325), and the Byzantine princess Maria Palaiologina (c. 1253–1325) who was married off by her father to the Ilkhan Arghun. The constant repetition of groups of three gives the book a comforting structure; readers find themselves looking for trios as new material is introduced.
Kinoshita's global approach is successful not only because she identifies multiple examples of a given topic, or because she draws parallels between Marco Polo and his contemporaries, but because at every turn she engages deeply with the material. Through her analysis Kinoshita argues that Marco Polo's world view was in many ways in fact closer to Arab, Persian, or Chinese writers rather than contemporaries in the Latin West. For example, she explains how some of the tropes of the “other” in The Description of the World connect to broader medieval interpretations of the other by drawing comparisons with texts describing island cultures written in Arabic and Chinese (pp. 118–9). Marco Polo's connectivity to the larger world stands in contrast to some of his contemporaries in the Latin West. Kinoshita notes this explicitly several times, for example when she writes “where a Dominican like William [of Adam, a Dominican friar] divides the world into Christians versus ‘Saracens’, Marco Polo sometimes seems to distinguish between merchants and everyone else that cuts across religious difference” (p. 122) and “Coming, like William of Adam, from the northern shores of the Mediterranean, Marco Polo nevertheless inhabits a world much closer to al-Nuwayrī's [an Egyptian encyclopaedist], reflecting the merchant's appreciation for the animal, vegetable, and mineral luxuries of the Indies combined with the cosmopolitan experience of a servant of the Great Khan” (pp. 153–4).
Compellingly written with beautiful illustrations, Marco Polo and His World is the perfect introduction for general readers, students, and academics to Marco Polo and his text.
