The Travels of Marco Polo
As the connection between East and West and the stage on which empires have clashed for centuries, the Silk Road is the source of endless fascination by cartographers. Maps contemporaneous with Rennell’s in The Travels of Marco Polo and those from later times have notable differences that are worth close examination. One such map, Asia and Its Islands by the French cartographer Jean-Baptiste Bourgiugnon D’Anville from 1787, makes a sprawling illustration of the Eurasian landmass in great detail (figure 5.1) [1]. Not only did D’Anville cover far-flung regions in his map, he also stepped back from the local-oriented view to provide visual commentary on the regional realties of the time. For example, colors were utilized in the 1787 map to delineate regions based on political and cultural ties, so that China, Mongol-controlled territory, and Korea were shown as separate entities. In Rennell’s map, however, there are no such distinctions. Nor was there any acknowledgement of the presence of the Yuan Dynasty during Polo’s travels or the cultural makeup of the civilizations along the Silk Road.
There are also noticeable differences between Rennell’s map and later works charting the geography of the Silk Road. Ferdinand von Richthofen’s map from 1877 was the first to apply the term “Silk Road” (die Seidentrasse) to transportation routes connecting the Chinese city of Chang’an (Xi’an) to the eastern regions of Persia (see Entry No. 8) [2]. Richthofen was the first European scholar to seriously use Chinese sources when studying Asian geography, as opposed to relying heavily on works by classical writers such as Ptolemy and Marnius. This approach makes his map unique by taking local knowledge into account. His map also utilizes color to differentiate terrain and climate, thus making it more useful for explorers working in the region than either Rennell’s or D’Anville’s. At the same time, Richthofen failed to show the full extent of the Silk Road as a vital route connecting East and West, a feature which was achieved more effectively by Rennell. In comparison, the Silk Road map reflects the priorities of the time it was produced. The Great Game, a term referring to the power struggles between the Russian and British Empires, dominated the geopolitics in Central Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Surveyors used cartography as a means to stake their claim to regional activities. To this end, Richthofen’s map succeeds, but it falls short in terms of capturing the grandeur of the Silk Road on a continental scale.
Examining the Rennell map in The Travels of Marco Polo in light of other survey maps of the region from different time periods underscores its uniqueness in production and aim. Unlike D’Anville’s map of Eurasia, Rennell made no effort to include every detail of the landmass, noting only those that Polo might have traveled through or visited during his decades of exploration across Asia. While Richthofen’s map sought to provide detailed analysis of terrain type, elevation, and transportation routes across the Silk Road, Rennell chose instead to use only labels and clusters of names to form a loose construction of the route across Central Asia. These discrepancies could well be interpreted as inadequacies in Rennell’s map to provide essential information. However, maps like Rennell’s serve a purpose decidedly separate from those from D’Anville and Richthofen in that it was meant for storytelling rather than to disseminate geographical knowledge. The inclusion of places visited by Polo positions the man himself as the subject of the map, not the landmass he traversed. Furthermore, the decision to omit Southern Europe and in particular, Italy, from the map gives another clue to the map’s true purpose.
Polo, a Venetian, began his journey in northern Italy and eventually returned there many years later. The first chapter in the Travels begins in Venice with Polo’s call to adventure and departure from the Italian city. Rennell’s choice to omit Italy thus removes the context of Polo’s early years, transforming him from a Venetian with a specific kind of upbringing and identity into an European broadly speaking. By presenting Polo as a person whose worth is wholly defined by the journey he took, the mapmaker ensured that readers in Europe could relate to and imagine themselves as Polo. In this way, Polo is a stand-in for the readers who, upon starting the book, will soon feel themselves traveling along the Silk Road as Polo did during the thirteenth century. The unique design of Rennell’s map reveals his intention not to provide readers with a tool to travel the Silk Road themselves but rather a guide as they are transported there by Polo. In transforming Polo from a historical figure into a vehicle through which a reader experiences the map and the narrative to follow, Rennell’s map gives Polo an almost mythical quality. The map should therefore be thought of as a literary device that aims to amplify the experience of reading The Travels and elevate Polo’s status among the readers.
The 1818 map by James Rennell stands out as one of the most significant maps to have been published in accompaniment to The Travels of Marco Polo. In a version of the book published in 1908, for example, no such map was included to illustrate Polo’s journey from Venice to Yuan China along the Silk Road. Rennell’s map and the 1818 publication of The Travels of Marco Polo is therefore significant both as a literary work and for its exceptional use of cartography to complement a travel memoir.
-Matt Slade
[1] The full title of D’Anville’s map is Asia and Its Islands according to D’Anville, Divided into Empires, Kingdoms, States, Regions, & ca. with the European Possessions and Settlements in the East Indies and an Exact Delineation of All the Discoveries Made in the Eastern Parts by the English under Captain Cook. It was published in Thomas Kitchin’s General Atlas, Describing the Whole Universe (London: Robert Sayer, 1790), pl. 22–23.
[2] The map was printed in Ferdinand von Richthofen, China: Ergebnisse eigener Reisen un darauf gegründeter Studien (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1877-1912), volume 1.