In the thirteenth century, Italian merchant and explorer Marco Polo traveled from Venice to the far reaches of Asia, a journey he chronicled in a narrative titled Il Milione, later known as The Travels of Marco Polo. While Polo’s writings would go on to inspire the likes of Christopher Columbus, scholars have long debated their veracity. Some have argued that Polo never even reached China, while others believe that he came as far as the Americas. Now, there’s new evidence for this historical puzzle: a very curious collection of fourteen little-known maps and related documents said to have belonged to the family of Marco Polo himself. In The Mysteries of the Marco Polo Maps, historian of cartography Benjamin B. Olshin offers the first credible book-length analysis of these artifacts, charting their course from obscure origins in the private collection of Italian-American immigrant Marcian Rossi in the 1930s; to investigations of their authenticity by the Library of Congress, J. Edgar Hoover, and the FBI; to the work of the late cartographic scholar Leo Bagrow; to Olshin’s own efforts to track down and study the Rossi maps, all but one of which are in the possession of Rossi’s great-grandson Jeffrey Pendergraft. Are the maps forgeries, facsimiles, or modernized copies? Did Marco Polo’s daughters—whose names appear on several of the artifacts—preserve in them geographic information about Asia first recorded by their father? Or did they inherit maps created by him? Did Marco Polo entrust the maps to Admiral Ruggero Sanseverino, who has links to Rossi’s family line? Or, if the maps have no connection to Marco Polo, who made them, when, and why? Regardless of the maps’ provenance, Olshin’s tale—stretching from the remote reaches of the northern Pacific to early Chinese legends—takes readers on a journey confounding yet fascinating, offering insights into Italian history, the age of exploration, and the wonders of cartography.
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This is the first credible book-length analysis of the maps once owned by the late Marcian Rossi, an Italian immigrant who believed the maps in his possession descended from the family of Marco Polo. In 1933, Rossi lent some of the maps to the Library of Congress for further study, at which time they caused quite a stir: leading to an examination by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, an article in the New York Times, and intensive but incomplete and unpublished reports conducted by the LOC. Rossi corresponded with the library until the 1950s, and even donated a map from his collection, known as the ?Map with Ship,” to the Geography and Map Division (though hyperspectral imaging, X-ray fluorescence [XRF], and carbon dating later discredited any immediate relation of the map to Marco Polo). In 1948, Rossi contacted a respected historian of cartography, the late Leo Bagrow, who published the first scholarly journal article about the maps in Imago Mundi. The trail grows rather cold until 1999, when Olshin, intrigued by Bagrow’s article since 1991, tracked down the great grandson of Marcian Rossi, Jeffrey Pendergraft, and embarked on a contemporary study of all the materials in Pendergraft’s private collection, many of which Bagrow had not examined. He renewed contact with the Library of Congress?as well as interest among map enthusiasts?considering issues relevant to genealogy, cartography, and Italian and Chinese history, while reviewing a wealth of related letters and manuscripts in the possession of Pendergraft and the LOC. In 2007, Olshin published the first formal and comprehensive study of the Rossi collection since Bagrow’s article a half century earlier, which appeared in Terrae Incognitae, re-opening the maps to interrogation, speculation, and scrutiny. This book explores the many possibilities surrounding the provenance of these maps and the questions they raise. Given what we do and do not know, and cannot possibly ascertain without paleographic evidence, he sets out to ask the right questions and find meaning in potential answers. Focusing on the content and context of the maps for more than a decade, the author has avoided the wild speculations of his predecessors and strikes a much-needed balance in the existing literature.
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