Great Princes, Emperors, and Kings, Dukes and Marquises, Counts,
Knights, and Burgesses! and People of all degrees who desire to get
knowledge of the various races of mankind and of the diversities of the
sundry regions of the World, take this Book and cause it to be read
to you. For ye shall find therein all kinds of wonderful things, and
the divers histories of the Great Hermenia, and of Persia, and of the
Land of the Tartars, and of India, and of many another country of which
our Book doth speak, particularly and in regular succession, according
to the description of Messer Marco Polo, a wise and noble citizen of
Venice, as he saw them with his own eyes. Some things indeed there be
therein which he beheld not; but these he heard from men of credit and
veracity. And we shall set down things seen as seen, and things heard
as heard only, so that no jot of falsehood may mar the truth of our
Book, and that all who shall read it or hear it read may put full faith
in the truth of all its contents.
For let me tell you that since our Lord God did mould with his hands
our first Father Adam, even until this day, never hath there been
Christian, or Pagan, or Tartar, or Indian, or any man of any nation,
who in his own person hath had so much knowledge and experience of
the divers parts of the World and its Wonders as hath had this Messer
Marco! And for that reason he bethought himself that it would be a
very great pity did he not cause to be put in writing all the great
marvels that he had seen, or on sure information heard of, so that
other people who had not these advantages might, by his Book, get such
knowledge. And I may tell you that in acquiring this knowledge he spent
in those various parts of the World good six-and-twenty years. Now,
being thereafter an inmate of the Prison at Genoa, he caused Messer
Rusticiano of Pisa, who was in the said Prison likewise, to reduce the
whole to writing; and this befell in the year 1298 from the birth of
Jesus.