＊   本书好评如潮，获《华尔街日报》、《Smithsonian》杂志、History.com…等推荐！
 
十三世纪时，义大利商人与探险家马可波罗从威尼斯远旅亚洲，他将这段旅程记录成《Il Milione》，也就是后来的《马可波罗游记》。虽然马可波罗的记录很可能是启发哥伦布的关键，但长久以来，学者们一直不断的争论其真实性。有些人说马可波罗根本就没到达中国，另一群人则坚信他除了中国，还去了美洲。现在，出现了能解开这个历史之谜的新证据：据传为马可波罗家族所有的十四张鲜为人知的地图与相关文件。
 
地图历史学家Benjamin B. Olshin 在《马可波罗地图之谜》中分析了这些文物，这些文物是1930年代，从义大利移民美国的Marcian Rossi 的私人收藏，Benjamin 将这些不为人知地图上的航线整理制成图表；由美国国会图书馆的J. Edgar Hoover和联邦调查局调查这些文物的真实性; 由学者Leo Bagrow进行后期制图工作； Benjamin B. Olshin则追溯与研究这些目前属于Rossi曾孙Jeffrey Pendergraft的地图。这些会是伪造、临摹、现代副本吗？ 好几份文件上都有马可波罗女儿们的名字，她们会在这些地理资料上留下关于父亲记录亚洲的讯息吗？还是她们只是继承了这些由父亲制成的地图？ 会是马可波罗将这些地图授予Admiral Ruggero Sanseverino这个与Rossi家族有关系的人吗?又或者，如果这些地图和马可波罗没有关系，又是谁制作了它们？什么时候作的？为什么要作？
 
无论地图出处为何，Benjamin B. Olshin的故事涵盖了遥远的北太平洋与早期的中国传说，带领读者踏上一段混杂却迷人的旅程，让人更了解义大利的历史、地理大发现时代以及地图学的奇迹。
 
好评
“Olshin’s book tugs powerfully at the imagination of anybody interested in the Polo story, medieval history, old maps, geographical ideas, European voyages of discovery, and early Chinese legends.”
(Toby Lester Wall Street Journal)
 
“The parchments’ existence first came to light in the 1930s when Rossi contacted the Library of Congress, but the collection has never been exhaustively analyzed—until now. Olshin . . . has spent more than a decade contextualizing the documents and translating their Italian, Latin, Arabic, and Chinese inscriptions. . . . Olshin is the first scholar in decades to see these originals. By painstakingly tracing Rossi’s ancestry, Olshin found that his explanation that Polo had bestowed the documents upon a Venetian admiral and that they had been passed down through generations of the Rossi family was credible.”
(Christopher Klein History.com)
 
“Olshin plays with the idea that Marco Polo’s relatives may have preserved geographical information about distant lands first recorded by him, or even that they may have inherited maps that he made. If genuine, Olshin argues, these maps and texts would confirm that Marco Polo knew about the New World two centuries before Columbus, either from his own experience or through hearing about it from the Chinese. . . . Fascinating material. . . . Olshin himself admits that there is no hard evidence to support his thrilling speculations. Including translations of every annotation and inscription, Olshin’s study and description of the fourteen parchments are exhaustive. His analysis, however, leaves many questions open. . . . A fascinating tale about maps, history and exploration.”
(Alessandro Scafi Times Literary Supplement (UK))

“For a guy who claimed to spend seventeen years in China as a confidant of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo left a surprisingly skimpy paper trail. No Asian sources mention the footloose Italian. The only record of his thirteenth-century odyssey through the Far East is the hot air of his own Travels, which was actually an ‘as told to’ penned by a writer of romances. But a set of fourteen parchments, now collected and exhaustively studied for the first time, give us a raft of new stories about Polo’s journeys and something notably missing from his own account: maps. . . .  But as Olshin is first to admit, the authenticity of the ten maps and four texts is hardly settled. The ink remains untested, and a radiocarbon study of the parchment of one key map—the only one subjected to such analysis—dates the sheepskin vellum to the fifteenth or sixteenth century, a sign the map is at best a copy. Another quandary is that Polo himself wrote nothing of personal maps or of lands beyond Asia, though he did once boast: ‘I did not tell half of what I saw.’”
(Ariel Sabar Smithsonian Magazine)
 
“Could rewrite history as we know it.”
(Jon Street TheBlaze)
 
“Olshin . . . brings to The Mysteries of the Marco Polo Maps linguistic skills acquired during work and travels in the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America, as well as an interest in cartography and in the history of exploration. . . . He is on firm ground when noting the known influence on cartography of Marco Polo’s travel tales, starting with the Catalan Atlas of 1375, and he is commendably cautious about the documents’ provenance, their interconnections, and their purported relationship to the Polo daughters and other named persons. Moreover, The Mysteries of the Marco Polo Maps is lucidly written and attractively produced with a number of useful illustrations.”
(Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography)
 
“A balanced, detailed, and scrupulously unspeculative work of cartographical scholarship, carefully footnoted and illustrated, not another ‘who discovered?’ sensation—a book that after a lapse of more than half a century attempts mainly to ‘lay a foundation for a deeper understanding of the material.’”
(Tim O’Connell Asian Review of Books)
 
“A valiant attempt to make sense of these documents, applying scholarly analysis from several different points of view: cartographic, mythological, historical, and linguistic. . . . Olshin is a thorough and thoughtful researcher and has successfully avoided speculating on the veracity of these frustrating and intriguing manuscripts. . . . This is a well written book which will be of interest to anyone interested in medieval history, cartography in general and Marco Polo in particular.”
(Richard Pflederer Portolan: Journal of the Washington Map Society)
 
“A needed, not wildly speculative contribution to the history of cartography, The Mysteries of the Marco Polo Maps carefully considers the content, context, and translation of these documents, and does not attempt to fill in missing links if the evidence is not sufficient to support a valid conclusion. Olshin presents well-informed speculation considering the implications of this set of maps, whether they are pure fabrication, created at some time after the purported events, or are actually what they appear to be. If the latter is the case, they represent a remarkable survival of fourteenth-century manuscripts that document in part Marco Polo’s travels through Asia to China, and possibly a much earlier discovery of North America (than Columbus's), particularly along its northwestern coast. A very balanced interpretation.”
(Ronald E. Grim Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library)
 
“The maps and documents associated with the Rossi family and the various claims that they date back to the time of Marco Polo have always been a mystery and a problem for historians of cartography, and, as such, they have cried out for a detailed, balanced, and careful scholarly study. Their history, discounted by some as mere fantasy, has scarcely been approached with the tools of serious scholarship. Olshin has finally produced not only a careful and serious study, but also a compelling and fascinating story that once again makes these maps objects of serious interest for all those concerned with medieval cartography and the transmission of geographic information through time.”
(John Hessler, FRGS curator, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress)
 
“A remarkable book on a remarkable subject. The conundrum posed by a collection of fourteen old maps and letters of different dates pertaining, or purporting to pertain, to Marco Polo’s travels in Asia in the thirteenth century is exquisitely dissected. The transmission of the documents themselves and the information they contain is scrutinized; possible (and impossible) connections are identified; genealogies are traced; and inconsistencies in personal and geographic names written in or coming from Italian, Latin, Chinese, and Arabic are exposed and explanations offered. Olshin wears his learning lightly. His lucid prose and straightforward approach capture from the beginning his readers’ attention, but they are then left to draw their own conclusions. Impressed by the number of documents involved and the complex ramifications of interconnections spanning seven centuries, even the most skeptical scholar would be hard pressed not to find for their authenticity, even if not all links in the chain are yet fully reforged.”
(Catherine Delano-Smith Institute of Historical Research, University of London)
 
关于作者
Benjamin B. Olshin 是费城艺术大学哲学与历史、科学与科技哲学的副教授。他目前住在美国宾州的费城。