{"id":5740,"date":"2014-02-23T20:02:55","date_gmt":"2014-02-24T02:02:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5740"},"modified":"2014-02-23T20:02:55","modified_gmt":"2014-02-24T02:02:55","slug":"impossible-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5740","title":{"rendered":"Impossible Cities"},"content":{"rendered":"

Darran Anderson:<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1298, the Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo found himself in a Genoese prison, having been seized at the helm of a war galley during the Battle of Curzola. There he met the chivalric writer Rustichello of Pisa to whom he related tales of his travels along the Silk Road into Asia in the previous decades. The resulting manuscript The Description of the World or The Travels of Marco Polo became a literary sensation, being reproduced across Medieval Europe. Such were the extravagant claims in this \u201cgreat book of puzzles\u201d, many were taken to be fabrications and Polo earned the nickname \u201cthe Man of a Million Lies\u201d. It was doubted by some that he\u2019d even travelled at all except around his own evidently vast imagination.<\/p>\n

The accounts did however contain many genuine discoveries alongside exaggerations, half-truths and myths (\u2018How the Prayer of the One-Eyed Cobbler Caused the Mountain to Move\u2019 for example) mixed together without differentiation. We can now pour scorn on his claims of desert sirens luring the unwary to their deaths, colossal birds who fed on elephants, idolaters \u201cadept in sorceries and diabolical arts\u201d who could control sandstorms or witnessing Noah\u2019s Ark perched on a mountaintop where the snow never melts. At the time, these were scarcely more unbelievable than his claims of \u201cstones that burn like logs\u201d (coal), paper currency, seeing the highest mountains in the world (the Himalayas) or visiting vast golden cities hung with the finest silks yet we know these now to be fairly accurate descriptions.<\/p>\n

The backbone of Polo\u2019s travelogue is made up of his visits to various Oriental cities (Baudas, Samarcan, Caracoron and so on) culminating in the opulent palaces of the Chinese Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, at whose court he was a guest for 17 years. His recollections of the centres and their populaces range from the mercantile (lists of industries and natural resources) to the fanciful; cities where the inhabitants are perpetually drunk, where men ride around on stags eating birds, where marriages are arranged between ghosts or the great Kaan in his marble palace drinks wine from levitating goblets. Often Polo would add boasts and hyperbole (\u201cno one could imagine finer\u201d is a recurring phrase) and even suggest he was holding back for fear of arousing incredulity in the readers (\u201cI will relate none of this in this book of ours; people would be amazed if they heard it, but it would serve no good purpose\u201d) which only served to further his ridicule. When he was on his deathbed, a priest giving last rites asked Polo if he wished to confess to exaggerating his recollections to which he replied, \u201cI did not reveal half of what I saw because no one would have believed me.\u201d Beyond their narrow confines, the world was more extraordinary than his sceptics were capable of imagining. Raised in the seemingly impossible \u2018floating city\u2019 of Venice, a maze of canals and alleys built on stilts in a lagoon, Marco Polo had no such limitations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Darran Anderson: In 1298, the Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo found himself in a Genoese prison, having been seized at the helm of a war galley during the Battle of Curzola. There he met the chivalric writer Rustichello of Pisa to whom he related tales of his travels along the Silk Road into Asia […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5740"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5740"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5741,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5740\/revisions\/5741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}