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The International Prester John Project: How A Global Legend Was Created Across Six Centuries

Marco Polo and His Travels

Marco Polo. The Book of Ser Marco Polo. Two Vols. Third ed. Trans. Henry Yule. London: John Murray,

1921-26.

___. The Travels of Marco Polo. Trans. by Teresa Waugh. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, Ltd., 1984.

___. The Travels of Marco Polo. Trans. and ed. by Manuel Komroff. New York: Norton, 2003.

Haeger, John W. “Marco Polo in China? Problems with Internal Evidence,” Bulletin of Sung-Yuan Studies xrv (1978): 22-30.

Jackson, Peter. “Marco Polo and His 'Travels.'” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 61.1 (1998): 82-101.

Olschki, Leonard. Marco Polo's Asia: An Introduction to His "Description of the World" Called “Il Milione.” Trans. J.A. Scott. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960.

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The Travels of Marco Polo
Devisement du monde (c. 1298)

The Devisement (or Livres des merveilles du monde) remains one of the most well-known narratives to survive the Middle Ages. Dictated by an imprisoned Marco Polo to fellow inmate and veteran romancer Rustichello da Pisa, the book records– and sometimes embellishes– the travels of Polo (along with his father and uncle) to the court of Kublai Khan in the late-thirteenth century.

Although written in French, the text was quickly translated into Italian and Latin. More than one hundred manuscripts survive, each slightly different from the others. The Travels became a medieval best seller, even though the imaginative flourishes of copyists makes it difficult to determine what the original text might have looked like.

Marco Polo's Travels features the figure of Prester John in a number of chapters (64-68, 74, 109-110, 139, 200). Polo, following the Dominican missionaries that visited the Mongol Empire before him, relates a tale of Prester John that demystifies the legendary qualities of the letter all the while testifying to the historical existence of an eastern Christian prince.

For Marco Polo, Prester John (or Un-khan) was a powerful prince who ruled over the Tartars (Mongols), but was overthrown, in a battle Polo himself describes, by Genghis/Chinggis Khan. Later, in the mid-14th century, the imaginary travels of Sir John Mandeville will crib from Polo's now-canonical observations about the east.

Silverberg (p. 132) puts Marco Polo's reduction of the Prester John legend succinctly:
For Marco, Prester John was a khan of the steppes, and he was dead, and his descendent of the sixth generation, King George, ruled the insignificant principality of Tenduc as Kublai Khan's vassal.

Even if Polo's narrative demystified the legend of Prester John, its romance narrative style, combined with its fascinating insights, some of which related tangentially to the Prester John legend (including visiting the shrine of St. Thomas), did not ultimately do much to diminish European interest in Prester John.

Background on Polo’s expedition.
See Polo’s route.

Brewer edits and translates the Prester John portions of Polo's travels (pp. 171-188).
Silverberg excerpts the three mentions of Prester John in the Travels.
More on the travels and their veracity.