those many thousand prisoners in Genoa; and here, before long, he
appears to have made acquaintance with a man of literary propensities,
whose destiny had brought him into the like plight, by name RUSTICIANO
or RUSTICHELLO of Pisa. It was this person perhaps who persuaded
the Traveller to defer no longer the reduction to writing of his
notable experiences; but in any case it was he who wrote down those
experiences at Marco’s dictation; it is he therefore to whom we owe the
preservation of this record, and possibly even that of the Traveller’s
very memory. This makes the Genoese imprisonment so important an