The following excerpt was taken from an introduction written by Ronald Latham, author of the translation of the Travels to which this Web page refers.

"The book most familiar to English readers as The Travels of Marco Polo was called in the prologue that introduced it to the reading public at the end of the thirteenth century a 'Description of the World' (Divisament dou Monde). It was in fact a description of a surprisingly large part of the world -- from the Polar Sea to Java, from Zanzibar to Japan -- and a surprisingly large part of it from first-hand observation. The claim put forward in the prologue, that its author had traveled more extensively than any man since the Creation, is a plain statement of fact, so far at least as it relates to anyone who has left a record of his travels. Even among the Arab globe-trotters he had no serious competitor till Ibn Battuta, two generations later. And to western Christendom the world he revealed was almost wholly unknown. Some stretches of the trail he blazed were trodden by no other European foot for over 600 years -- not, perhaps, till the opening of Burma Road during the last war. And the task of putting it on the map, in the most literal sense, is not yet complete.

The book can be enjoyed by the modern reader, as it was by the contemporary, for its own sake, as a vivid description of a fantastic world so remote from his own experience that it scarcely matters whether he thinks of it as fact or fiction. The inquirer who wishes to explore this world more thoroughly, in order to read the book with a just appraisal of its place in the development of human intercourse and knowledge, will find himself embarked on a journey potentially as long and varied as Polo's own."