Gabriele Capecchi

Abstract

　　Le Devisement dou monde—Marco Polo’s travel narrative— yields lively naturalistic descriptions, together with curiosities about Chinese flora. In relations with Europe, the role of citrus fruits stands out, (as these were) sent to Tuscany by the Franciscans friars in Quanzhou for medical purposes.

　　Opposite to Aristotelian cosmogony (Grant, 1993), far beyond the extreme boundary of the Ganges River (Cornish, 1993), Le Devisement dou monde features a southern hemisphere rich in vegetation, to be ordered according to Theophrastus (Repici, 2009, pp. 77-94). In 1303 Pietro d’Abano meets Marco Polo ratifying his naturalistic proposition (Bottin, 2008) – the Conciliator Differentiarum takes up the description of ‘unicorn’, a rhinoceros indeed (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) – through Giovanni da Montecorvino (Jensen, 1997). The scholar thus anticipates the modern supporters of the Venetian traveller (Huang, 1986; De Rachewiltz, 1997; Tucci, 1997; Haw, 2006, pp. 1-7; Vogel, 2013, pp. 1-11), refuting the revisionist arguments (Wood, 1995, passim), where the text is attributed to previous family dealings with Byzantium and the Mongolian East (Jacoby, 2006), or to fārsī diaries (Haeger, 1978), at that time ‘lingua franca’ for the terrestrial Silk Road (Huang, 1986; Haw, 2014). About the Polian flora (Bretschneider, 1898, I, pp. 1-5), the text applies indeed a sequencing fee: whether those botanical varieties grew up in the coeval Venetian dominion, or comparable to known specimens, or wholly dissimilar.

　　At the beginning (Corna Pellegrini, 2005), the trail leads to ‘Cama[n]di’ (Polo, 1903, I, p. 97), the Persian Qamādīn near Jiroft (Le Strange, 1905, p. 314; Barthold, 1984, p. 141), where Polo recalls an ‘Adam’s apple’ (Citrus aurata) – in Outremer around 1223 (De Vitry, 1527, pp. 170-171), so featured for the distinctive furrow on the pericarpium (Capecchi, 2017, pp. 576-578) – and redirects to richer citrus farming in the current province of Fujian.

　　In the Han era, sea trade with the Austronesian peoples favored the building of large harbors in southern China, but mainly the introduction of fruit trees and spices – black pepper (Piper nigrum), nutmeg (Miristica officinalis), ginger (Zingiber officinale) – spotted by the Traveler (Blench, 2005), together with endemic crops (Laufer, 1919): rhubarb (Rheum palmatum), cassia (Cinnamomum aromaticum), camphor (Laurus camphora). Polo some-times lapses into extravagant topics: the use of ‘canes’ (Bambusa arundinacea) for the Qubilai summer pavilion in Shangdū (Shatzman Steinhardt, 2024, pp. 104-115), the Mongolian abuse of rice wine, or the value of sorghum in the Yuan civilization (Polo, 1903, II, p. 24). The tea ceremony is between the alleged omissions (due perhaps to Rustichello), but the Polian text testifies to agronomic excellences as mulberry (Morus alba), in the production cycle of silk (leaves), also for paper (bark).

　　Polo reserves a particular role for Zayton (Quanzhou), a seaport already in the Neolithic age and active for centuries – see the routes to Tai-Ch’in, the Roman Empire (Jenkins, 2008, pp. 64–68), or the return of the Polo family to the West – until the Song period, when shipyards were built: here the great k’un-lun-po and the oceanic junks are set (Manguin, 1993). The huge docks – in 1345 Ibn Baṭṭūṭa contained 1.500.000 vessels (Dunn, 2012, pp. 249-250) – and the multi-ethnic context attracted Giovanni da Montecorvino who in 1308 erected there a diocese (Huc, 1857-1858, I, pp. 391-397), enlarged ten years later by a convent and probably with a hospital for the poor, funded with imperial aid (Polo, 1903, I, p. 444). Several diseases were treated through Chenpi 陳皮 (Xu et al., 2002, pp. 272–273), active substance in TCM and taken from the ‘orange mandarin’ (Citrus reticulata), or similar local varieties (Hagerty, 1923, pp. 74-79) – Citrus tangerina ‘Fujien’ 海红柑, Citrus erythrosa 朱橘, Citrus ponki 甜橘 – and above all the Citrus sinensis ‘Liucheng’ 柳橙. Traces of this fruit can be found in Pisa at the Franciscan monastery of Santa Croce in Fossabanda – coming from Zayton in the mid-fourteenth century for medical purposes – there it was rediscovered in 1674 by Paolo Boccone, botanist of Cosimo III de’ Medici, and merged into the grand-ducal collections, thence depicted by Bartolomeo Bimbi before 1715 (Capecchi, 2022).

Gabriele Capecchi.

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