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0078 The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.2
マルコ=ポーロ卿の記録 : vol.2
The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.2 / 78 ページ(カラー画像)

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doi: 10.20676/00000269
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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.