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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
RUSTICIEN DE PISE
59
~►
~
Robert de Borron, and Hélis de Borron. And these abridg-
ments or recasts are professedly the work of Le Maistre Rusticien
de Pise. Several of them were printed at Paris in the end of
the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries as the works of
Rusticien de Pise ; and as the preambles and the like, especially
in the form presented in those printed editions, appear to be due
sometimes to the original composers (as Robert and Hélis de
Borron) and sometimes to Rusticien de Pise the recaster, there
would seem to have been a good deal of confusion made in
regard to their respective personalities.
From a preamble to one of those compilations which un-
doubtedly belongs to Rustician, and which we shall quote at
length by and bye, we learn that Master Rustician " translated "
(or perhaps transferred?) his compilation from a book belonging
to King Edward of England, at the time when that prince went
beyond seas to recover the Holy Sepulchre. Now Prince
Edward started for the Holy Land in 127o, spent the winter of
that year in Sicily, and arrived in Palestine in May 1271. He
quitted it again in August, 1272, and passed again by Sicily,
where in January, 1273, he heard of his father's death and his own
consequent accession. Paulin Paris supposes that Rustician
was attached to the Sicilian Court of Charles of Anjou, and that
Edward " may have deposited with that king the Romances
of the Round Table, of which all the world was talking, but the
manuscripts of which were still very rare, especially those of the
work of Helye de Borron * .. . . whether by order, or only
with permission of the King of Sicily, our Rustician made
haste to read, abridge, and re-arrange the whole, and when
Edward returned to Sicily he recovered possession of the
book from which the indefatigable Pisan had extracted the
contents."
But this I believe is, in so far as it passes the facts stated in
Rustician's own preamble, pure hypothesis, for nothing is cited
that connects Rustician with the King of Sicily. And if there
be not some such confusion of personality as we have alluded to,
in another of the preambles, which is quoted by Dunlop as an
utterance of Rustician's, that personage would seem to claim to
have been a comrade in arms of the two de Borrons. We
e Giron le Cow-tois, and the conclusion of Tristan. VOL. I.
~2
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