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While troubadours and minnesingers were busy with the court of Arthur, and grave Latinists like Rusticiano of Pisa wrote of Launcelot and Guenevere; the Carolingian epics seem to have been mainly sung about by illiterate jongleurs, and to have busied the pens of prose hackwriters for the benefit of townsfolk.
Ramusio's preface, containing this account, and also the story of how Rusticiano came to write the book at Marco Polo's dictation at Genoa, is translated in Yule, op. cit., I, Introd., pp. 4-8. He mentions these in Marco Polo, op. cit., pp. 136, 138, 344. Yule, op. cit., I, Introd., p. 79. Paulin Paris, quoted ibid., Introd., p. 61. Ibid., Introd., pp. 67-73.
To beguile the tedium of their imprisonment, Marco was wont to tell his traveller's tales to his companion, Rusticiano, and this worthy gentleman conceived the notion of writing out the marvellous adventures and observations of his fellow-prisoner.
Rusticiano wrote in a very poor sort of French; for then, as now, that language was commonest in all the cities of Europe. How much of the language of the book of Marco Polo's travels was Marco's, and how much was the worthy Rusticiano's, we are unable to decide. The facts in that famous book were duly vouched for by Marco.
The Venetians were beaten ignominiously, and 7,000 of them were taken prisoners and carried to Genoa. It was a lucky thing for the world that Marco Polo was thus put into enforced idleness, and that he had for a companion in confinement an educated gentleman, one Rusticiano, of Pisa.
Now, being thereafter an inmate of the Prison at Genoa, he caused Messer Rusticiano, of Pisa, who was in the same Prison likewise, to reduce the whole to writing; and this befell in the year 1298 from the birth of Jesus." One year later, in the summer of 1299, Marco Polo was set at liberty and returned to Venice, where he died peacefully in 1324.
The prisoners were put in chains and cast into prison, and among them was Marco Polo. In the prison Marco had a companion in misfortune, the author Rusticiano from Pisa.
'Alas, remarks his French editor, 'that the copy of Lancelot which fell into the hands of poor Francesca of Rimini was not one of those expurgated by Rusticiano! Sometimes hereafter his name occurs in the records of Venice, as he moves about on his lawful occasions. We know too, from his will, that he had a wife named Donata, and three daughters, Fantina, Bellela, and Moreta.
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