The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 by Marco Polo and da Pisa Rusticiano

Marco as a citizen, slight and quaint enough; being a resolution on the Books of the Great Council to exempt the respectable Marco Polo from the penalty incurred by him on account of the omission to have his water-pipe duly inspected. But since our Marco’s claims to the designation of _Nobilis Vir_ have been established, there is a doubt whether the _providus vir_ or _prud’-homme_ here spoken of may not have been rather his namesake Marco Polo of Cannareggio or S. Geremia, of whose existence we learn from another entry of the same year.[3] It is, however, possible that Marco the Traveller was called to the Great Council _after_ the date of the document in question. We have seen that the Traveller, and after him his House and his Book, acquired from his contemporaries the surname, or nickname rather, of _Il Milione_. Different writers have given different explanations of the origin of this name; some, beginning with his contemporary Fra Jacopo d’Acqui, (_supra_, p. _54_), ascribing it to the family’s having brought home a fortune of a million of _lire_, in fact to their being _millionaires_. This is the explanation followed by Sansovino, Marco Barbaro, Coronelli, and others.[4] More far-fetched is that of Fontanini, who supposes the name to have been given to the Book as containing a great number of stories, like the _Cento Novelle_ or the _Thousand and One Nights!_ But there can be no doubt that Ramusio’s is the true, as it is the natural, explanation; and that the name was bestowed on Marco by the young wits of his native city, because of his frequent use of a word which appears to have been then unusual, in his attempts to convey an idea of the vast wealth and magnificence of the Kaan’s Treasury and Court.[5] Ramusio has told us (_supra_, p. _6_) that he had seen Marco styled by this sobriquet in the Books of the Signory; and it is pleasant to be able to confirm this by the next document which we cite. This is an extract from the Books of the Great Council under 10th April, 1305, condoning the offence of a certain Bonocio of Mestre in smuggling wine, for whose penalty one of the sureties had been the NOBILIS VIR MARCHUS PAULO MILIONI.[6] It is alleged that long after our Traveller’s death there was always, in the Venetian Masques, one individual who assumed the character of Marco Milioni, and told Munchausenlike stories to divert the vulgar. Such, if this be true, was the honour of our prophet among the populace of his own country.[7]