74 pages • 2 hours read
The Travels of Marco Polo
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Symbols & Motifs
Numbers
Polo uses large numbers to describe the vastness of an assembled army or an imperial palace or even of a group of people who hold high rank but still owe fealty to the Great Khan. In one chapter, the Khan is said to have the command of 12,000 barons: “On these twelve thousand barons he bestows thirteen changes of raiment, all different from one another” (2281-82).In a battle Polo describes, the armies are very large: “On both sides there were about a hundred thousand horsemen” (4433-34). Of Kublai Khan’s four wives, Polo says that “[n]one of them has fewer than three hundred young female attendants of great beauty” (1989). In the realm of gifts, on New Year’s Day, “His Majesty receives at this festival has no fewer than a hundred thousand horses” (2258-59).
The Exotic Unknown
So many things that Polo mentions would have been unfamiliar to many of his readers, and to him. He describes these things in varying degrees of detail. The word “exotic” does not appear, yet the concept does. Examples of this include:
- “a variety of other fruits, grow, among which is one called Adam’s apple, which is unknown in our cool climate” (1001-02);
- “among which are found the francolin partridge, birds of the parrot kind, and a variety of others unknown to our climate” (1036);
- “They have a small breed of sheep, whose ears are not located like those in other species; two small horns grow in place of them, and lower down, toward the nose, there are two openings that serve the purpose of ears” (4351-53).
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