国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

THE Latin text, which is here printed for the first time, forms the second
volume of a large edition of Marco Polo which has been planned by
Sir Percival David, with the help of Professor Paul Pelliot and other
scholars and of myself. As it is not possible to publish the remainder of the book
immediately (though it is hoped that the first volume will follow very soon), it has
seemed right to allow readers to have this Latin text, which was actually printed
in the Spring of 1935, without further delay.

The extreme importance of this previously unused text, here called Z, was
shown in his monumental Il Milione, 1928, by Professor L. F. Benedetto, who
had found in the Ambrosiana at Milan a copy of it made in 1795 for Joseph Toaldo,
who borrowed the original for the purpose from the library of Cardinal Francisco
Xavier de Zelada at Rome. This copy, though generally faithful, was, as is
now seen, mistaken in many small and some more important details ; and it is a
matter for great congratulation that the original was found at Toledo (where it
had been almost unnoticed for 130 years) in 1932 by Sir Percival David, as was
announced in The Times, 4 April 1936, in Le Temps, 10 April 1936, and in the Comptes
Rendus of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1936, pp. 84,85.* For-
mal permission to print the text was granted by the Dean and Chapter of
Toledo Cathedral on 12 February 1934.

The manuscript is written on laid paper, the page measuring 21·3 cm. × 14 cm.,
the writing occupying approximately 16·4 × 9·1, the outer margin being about
3·3, and the tail usually 3·4 cm. The book consists of an independent title
written on paper like that of the rest of the manuscript probably in the seventeenth
century (fol. 11º, verso blank, cf. p. iii), and of twelve gatherings consisting
respectively of 10, 10, 10, 12, 10, 10, 12, 12, 12, 12, 12 leaves, numbered (in
modern pencil) 2 to 135. The number of lines to a page varies from 26 to 28 in
the gatherings 1, 4, 5, and 9 ; 24 lines in 6 and 7 ; 23 or 24 in 8 ; 27 in 2 and 3 ;
28 in 10 and 11 ; and 25 to 30 in 12, the last leaf having 13 lines on the recto
and the verso blank. The margins contain a large number of notes in the same
hand as the text. These are usually, and especially in the first half, religious—
adorant ydola, &c., and there are many cases of the single word nota, which in
1795 was transcribed as non. On fol. 2rº (page v), so high up that it did not
appear on the photographs from which the text below was printed, is written in a
rather later hand : Incipit liber domini Marci pauli veneti. The writing is judged by