Marco Polo on Java

This piece appeared on my Patreon account way back in 2022. I thought I’d move it here so that it would be more accessible.

MARCO POLO VISITED SOUTHEAST ASIA in the 1290s, on his return from China by sea. He stopped in Sumatra, staying there for several months, and he also appears to have recorded some information about, but crucially did not visit, the island of Java. This information was apparently taken from the comments of sailors, perhaps in the ports of southern China, and it found its way into the text of Polo’s travel account. This account was not written by Polo himself but rather by one Rustichello of Pisa, a writer of romances who met Polo while both were imprisoned by the Genoese after Polo’s return to Italy.

Rustichello’s original text was written in an Italian-inflected dialect of Old French, and it became the basis of the so-called ‘Franco-Italian’ tradition of the Marco Polo travels. This version was extremely popular in the late Middle Ages, serving as the basis of translations into Latin and most European vernaculars; there’s even a surviving abridged translation into Irish (Cork, University College Cork, The Book of Lismore — Indo-Malaysian places feature on f.130r). The Polo texts are complex, though, and there also appears to have been a parallel tradition in the Venetian language, Polo’s mother tongue, which mentions a few things that do not appear in the Franco-Italian tradition, although it is preserved in a single manuscript of late date. The most ‘complete’ Polo text is perhaps the Italian version compiled by Giovanni Battista Ramusio in the sixteenth century, but it isn’t clear just how much of that text is later interpolation.

In any case, Rustichello’s original autograph does not survive. An early unpolished Italian-influenced French manuscript does, however, and its language is strikingly similar to that of other texts known to have been written by Rustichello. This manuscript is Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 1116. It is thought to have been copied in around 1310 and is traditionally known to Polo scholars as the ‘F’ manuscript.

Of all the surviving copies, Français 1116/’F’ is likely to be closest to Rustichello’s original text — which means that its French is rather strange and aberrant, and it is for that reason not often used as the basis of modern editions of the French text (like that by Pierre-Yves Badel (1998) or the multi-volume Ménard edition (2009)). ‘F’ was published in the 1928 edition by Luigi Foscolo Benedetto, however, and its age makes it interesting in its own right.

What I find interesting about Français 1116 is that it preserves many placenames seemingly intact. In later manuscripts of the Polo travels, and in works based on them, like the Catalan Atlas, the name of Java is somewhat corrupt; it usually appears as ⟨Jana⟩ rather than ⟨Jaua⟩. In Français 1116, though, the word is written clearly and consistently as ⟨Jaua⟩ or ⟨iaua⟩, from an original Malay or Javanese Jawa, perhaps known to Polo through al-Jāwa, its Arabic name (Figure 1). The same applies to some other place names, notably including ⟨samatra⟩ for the Sumatran polity. (The ⟨t⟩ is often lost in other manuscripts.)

Fig. 1 — The first part of the extract below, taken from the new colour version of the digitised manuscript. (When I first wrote this piece, two years ago, shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the only available digitial copy was an old black-and-white version.) Note that the spelling here is clearly ⟨iaua⟩ and not ⟨Jana⟩, the spelling that later became the dominant form of the word in European texts on Asia. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 1116, f.74vb.

The description of Java appears in the sixth book of the Travels, immediately after an account of Champa in what is now southern Vietnam. (There is a persistent association between the two in medieval travel literature.) Java is here referred to the big or bigger island of Java, in contrast to the smaller island of ‘Java’, which in the Polo texts refers to Sumatra. (Never mind that Sumatra is quite a bit bigger than Java in reality.) In Français 1116, this description appears on ff.74vb-74ra. I have transcribed the text below from the digitised copy of the manuscript, and my translation follows the transcription.

I have not normalised the spelling, so to help you with the palaeography — assuming you want to follow along with the French text — here’s a brief summarise of the abbreviations used in the extract below:

⟨ɔ⟩ = con (e.g. ⟨ɔtere⟩ = contere)
tilde = nasal vowel/consonant (e.g. ⟨gra᷉t⟩ = grant, modern French grand)
inverted tilde = r- (e.g. ⟨mai᷈er⟩ = mariner)
⟨e᷉⟩ = the truncated form of est
⟨q᷉⟩ = que (usually written qe in F)
Tironian ⟨⁊⟩ = et

(f.74vb)
[…]
Clxij
Ci deuise de la grãt isle de iaua.
<O>r sachies que quant
len separt de cianban ⁊ ala entre
midi ⁊ scelonc .m. .d. miles et
adonc uient a une grandisime [5]
isle qe e᷉ apelle iaua qe selonc q᷉
les buen mai᷈er dient qe bien
le seuent ceste e᷉ la greingnor isle
qe soit au mo᷉de qe bien gire e᷉n-
uiron plus de troi milia miles el- [10]
le e᷉ au grant roi e sunt ydres ⁊
ne font treu a home dou mo᷉de
ceste ysle e᷉ de mout gra᷉t richece
il ont peure enoces moscee ⁊ espí
eganlanga ecubebe egarofali ⁊ [15]
de toutes cheres espicerie qe len
peust trouer au mo᷉de eadeste isle
uiene᷉t grant qua᷉tite de nes e
de mercaanz qe hi acatent de
maintes mercandies ⁊ hi font [20]
grant profit egrant gaagne e en
ceste isle ha si grant treçor qe ne

(f.75ra)
est home au mo᷉de qe le peust ɔtere
ne dire. Esi uos di qe le grant kan
nela pot unques auoir por la longe [25]
uoie epor la doutosse qui hi estoit a
naier e de ceste ysle les marcantɀ
de çaiton e dou mangi ont ia mout
grandisme tresor trait entraie᷉t en-
core tout ior. [30]

‘Indeed you should know that when one sails south-south-east from Champa for 1,500 miles one comes to a huge island called Java. According to good mariners who know it well, this is the biggest island in the world, having a circumference of more than 3,000 miles. It has a great king, and the people are idolaters. They pay no tribute to anyone on Earth and are very wealthy, producing pepper, nutmeg, spikenard, galangal, cubebs, and cloves, and all the precious spices that can be found in the world.

‘Many ships and merchants come to this island and buy there a great range of merchandise, making big profits and big gains. The island has so much treasure that it is beyond counting. And indeed I tell you that the Great Khan has never been able to conquer it because of the long and hazardous voyage there. It is from this island that the merchants of Çaiton [Quánzhōu] and Mangi [southern China] have acquired much of their wealth.’

The description of Java doesn’t vary too much between versions; the main differences are in the list of spices said to be available on the island. Incidentally, this list has counterparts in earlier descriptions of Southeast Asian islands in Arabic, like that of al-Mas‘ūdi, and may reflect a kind of Indian Ocean oral tradition about the region’s riches.

I will save exhaustive commentary on this passage for another time. It’s interesting, of course, that Polo/Rustichello says that Java is the biggest island in the world, and there’s a lot to say about the claim that the ‘Great Khan’ was unable to conquer the island, particularly in light of the recent discovery of a Chinese inscription in Indonesia referring to the 1292 Mongol expedition — but those topics can be dealt with at length another time.

A. J. West — Leiden, 2022 (posted here 2024).

References

Polo, Marco. 1928. Il milione. Prima edizione integrale a cura di L. F. Benedetto. Florence: L. S. Olschki.

Polo, Marco. 1998. La Description du monde. Pierre-Yves Badel (ed and trans). Le Livre de Poche.

Polo, Marco. 2009. Le Devisement du Monde. Edition critique publiée sous la direction de Philippe Ménard. Geneva: Droz.