The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 2

Chapter 96: BOOK FOURTH.

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History - Medieval/Middle Ages Travel Writing

About This Book

The volume recounts rivalries and military campaigns among Mongol/Tartar princes, tracing shifting successions, key battles, and episodes of captivity and restoration, while interweaving reports on the peoples, geography, and customs of northern regions. It includes descriptions of remote lands and seafaring straits, observations on animals, trade practices, and modes of travel, and shorter narrative summaries where full text is lacking. Extensive appendices collect genealogies, manuscript traditions, maps, bibliographies, notes on coins, weights, and measures, and textual remarks and indices that clarify sources, variants, and historical place-names.

BOOK FOURTH.

WARS AMONG THE TARTAR PRINCES
AND
SOME ACCOUNT OF THE NORTHERN COUNTRIES

Note.—A considerable number of the quasi-historical chapters in this section (which I have followed M. Pauthier in making into a Fourth Book) are the merest verbiage and repetition of narrative formulæ without the slightest value. I have therefore thought it undesirable to print all at length, and have given merely the gist (marked thus ⚜), or an extract, of such chapters. They will be found entire in English in H. Murray’s and Wright’s editions, and in the original French in the edition of the Société de Géographie, in Bartoli, and in Pauthier.