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National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.2 |
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Citation Information
44 MARCO POLO
After that you come at length to a tract where there are
towns and villages in considerable numbers. The people
of those towns have a strange custom in regard to
marriage which I will now relate.
No man of that country would on any consideration
take to wife a girl who was a maid ; for they say a wife
is nothing worth unless she has been used to consort with
men. And their custom is this, that when travellers
come that way, the old women of the place get ready, and
take their unmarried daughters or other girls related to
them, and go to the strangers who are pass/rig, and make
over the young women to whomsoever will accept them ;
and the travellers take them accordingly and do their
pleasure ; after which the girls are restored to the old
women who brought them, for they are not allowed to
follow the strangers away from their home. In this
manner people travelling that way, when they reach a
village or hamlet or other inhabited place, shall find
perhaps 20 or 3o girls at their disposal. And if the
travellers lodge with those people they shall have as many
young women as they could wish coming to court them !
You must know too that the traveller is expected to give
the girl who has been with him a ring or some other trifle,
something in fact that she can show as a lover's token
when she comes to be married. And it is for this in
truth and for this alone that they follow that custom ; for
every girl is expected to obtain at least 20 such tokens
in the way I have described before she can be married.
And those who have most tokens, and so can show they
have been most run after, are in the highest esteem, and
most sought in marriage, because they say the charms of
such an one are greatest.4 But after marriage these
people hold their wives very dear, and would consider
it a great villainy for a man to meddle with another's
wife ; and thus though the wives have before marriage
BOOK II.
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