Peter Costello
Marco Polo and his party crossing the wilds in inner Asia on their way to China. We are all aware of the great importance of ancient Irish manuscripts to our knowledge of the past and the history of the peoples that have lived in Ireland.
But the prominence of the Book of Kells has distorted this tradition. The Book of Kells is a liturgical set of the gospels, but the text is unimportant compared with its decorations. The book is a work of art, and it has become one of the country›s great tourist resources — which seems very strange as to many of those who visit it the nature of the text has little or no meaning.
Irish manuscripts are scattered around Europe. It is a surprise to many that an important manuscript relating to St Columcille was preserved in the monastery Schaffhausen in distant Switzerland — an outcome of the effect of the Irish Diaspora.
Here at home the manuscript with the most curious history is perhaps the great Book of Lismore. This was discovered in 1814 on the reopening of a walled up doorway in Lismore Castle, the great Waterford mansion of the Duke of Devonshire. It is a magnificent book written on vellum sheets of the largest size. Along with it was found a bishop’s crosier.
Like so many books of its kind it contains a variety of texts, the most important in the eyes of some being a collection of the lives of the saints; but there was also a romance Charlemagne, a history of the Lombards, and tales of Irish history. Among the texts was also, surprisingly, a version of the inner Asian travels of Marco Polo, translated into contemporary Irish.
The book was created about 1460 for Finghin MacCarthy and his wife Catherine Fitzgerald, the daughter of Gerald, eighth Earl of Desmond. The Marco Polo text is of uncertain date as regards the translation into Irish, but is a version of the Latin text by Friar Francisco Pipino, created before 1322. It lacks, however, the beginning and end, suggesting that recording it was an effort to preserve an interesting text that had made its way to Ireland, but was damaged.
As it stands the text describes Lesser Armenia, Greater Armenia, Mosul, and other places in the vicinity of Persia. It breaks off after a description of Abaschia. This forms roughly pages 20-42 in the old Penguin paperback translation. In The Book of Lismore it fills twenty pages of the closely written Irish script, which was later edited for a German philological journal by Whitely Stokes.
However, for the general reader it was described by Eugene O’Curry in his lectures on the manuscript materials of ancient Irish history, which he gave in public in his role as professor of archaeology at Newman’s university, the first ever post of its kind in these islands.
We all too often think of the archives of Irish manuscripts as being important to Irish affairs, but as this version of Marco Polo shows, this was not the case.
Medieval Irish lords were as interested in the wider world as they were in their island’s past. All kinds of materials unrelated directly to Ireland, such as Arthurian romances, interested them. But the narrative of Marco Polo, when read aloud to them, would have carried them in their imaginations off to distant Asia, at much the same time indeed as the same text in Italian was inspiring the imagination of Christopher Columbus.
Perhaps Ireland and its leaders were more connected with the greater word than we sometimes think. Such at least was the opinion of Sir Henry Yule, the great expert on the intricacies of Polo’s travels and Asia generally. Our present day concerns about the Middle East, India, and even China, have deep roots.