Volume I Part 28 (2/2)
The Pisans, more than one-fourth inferior in strength, came out boldly, and the battle was fought off the Porto Pisano, in fact close in front of Leghorn, where a lighthouse on a remarkable arched bas.e.m.e.nt still marks the islet of MELORIA, whence the battle got its name. The day was the 6th of August, the feast of St. Sixtus, a day memorable in the Pisan Fasti for several great victories. But on this occasion the defeat of Pisa was overwhelming. Forty of their galleys were taken or sunk, and upwards of 9000 prisoners carried to Genoa. In fact so vast a sweep was made of the flower of Pisan manhood that it was a common saying then: ”_Che vuol veder Pisa, vada a Genova_!” Many n.o.ble ladies of Pisa went in large companies on foot to Genoa to seek their husbands or kinsmen: ”And when they made enquiry of the Keepers of the Prisons, the reply would be, 'Yesterday there died thirty of them, to-day there have died forty; all of whom we have cast into the sea; and so it is daily.'”[3]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Seal of the Pisan Prisoners.]
A body of prisoners so numerous and important naturally exerted themselves in the cause of peace, and through their efforts, after many months of negotiation, a formal peace was signed (15th April, 1288). But through the influence, as was alleged, of Count Ugolino (Dante's) who was then in power at Pisa, the peace became abortive; war almost immediately recommenced, and the prisoners had no release.[4] And, when the 6000 or 7000 Venetians were thrown into the prisons of Genoa in October 1298, they would find there the scanty surviving remnant of the Pisan Prisoners of Meloria, and would gather from them dismal forebodings of the fate before them.
It is a fair conjecture that to that remnant Rusticiano of Pisa may have belonged.
We have seen Ramusio's representation of the kindness shown to Marco during his imprisonment by a certain Genoese gentleman who also a.s.sisted him to reduce his travels to writing. We may be certain that this Genoese gentleman is only a distorted image of Rusticiano, the Pisan prisoner in the gaol of Genoa, whose name and part in the history of his hero's book Ramusio so strangely ignores. Yet patriotic Genoese writers in our own times have striven to determine the ident.i.ty of this their imaginary countryman![5]
[Sidenote: Rusticiano, a person known from other sources.]
39. Who, then, was Rusticiano, or, as the name actually is read in the oldest type of MS., ”Messire Rustacians de Pise”?
Our knowledge of him is but scanty. Still something is known of him besides the few words concluding his preamble to our Traveller's Book, which you may read at pp. 1-2 of the body of this volume.
In Sir Walter Scott's ”Essay on Romance,” when he speaks of the new mould in which the subjects of the old metrical stories were cast by the school of prose romancers which arose in the 13th century, we find the following words:--
”Whatever fragments or shadows of true history may yet remain hidden under the ma.s.s of acc.u.mulated fable which had been heaped upon them during successive ages, must undoubtedly be sought in the metrical romances.... But those prose authors who wrote under the imaginary names of RUSTICIEN DE PISE, Robert de Borron, and the like, usually seized upon the subject of some old minstrel; and recomposing the whole narrative after their own fas.h.i.+on, with additional character and adventure, totally obliterated in that operation any shades which remained of the original and probably authentic tradition,” &c.[6]
Evidently, therefore, Sir Walter regarded Rustician of Pisa as a person belonging to the same ghostly company as his own Cleishbothams and Dryasdusts. But in this we see that he was wrong.
In the great Paris Library and elsewhere there are ma.n.u.script volumes containing the stories of the Round Table abridged and somewhat clumsily combined from the various Prose Romances of that cycle, such as _Sir Tristan, Lancelot, Palamedes, Giron le Courtois_, &c., which had been composed, it would seem, by various Anglo-French gentlemen at the court of Henry III., styled, or styling themselves, Ga.s.ses le Blunt, Luces du Gast, Robert de Borron, and Helis de Borron. And these abridgments or recasts are professedly the work of _Le Maistre Rusticien de Pise_. Several of them were printed at Paris in the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries as the works of Rusticien de Pise; and as the preambles and the like, especially in the form presented in those printed editions, appear to be due sometimes to the original composers (as Robert and Helis de Borron) and sometimes to Rusticien de Pise the recaster, there would seem to have been a good deal of confusion made in regard to their respective personalities.
From a preamble to one of those compilations which undoubtedly belongs to Rustician, and which we shall quote at length by and bye, we learn that Master Rustician ”translated” (or perhaps _transferred?_) his compilation from a book belonging to King Edward of England, at the time when that prince went beyond seas to recover the Holy Sepulchre. Now Prince Edward started for the Holy Land in 1270, spent the winter of that year in Sicily, and arrived in Palestine in May 1271. He quitted it again in August, 1272, and pa.s.sed again by Sicily, where in January, 1273, he heard of his father's death and his own consequent accession. Paulin Paris supposes that Rustician was attached to the Sicilian Court of Charles of Anjou, and that Edward ”may have deposited with that king the Romances of the Round Table, of which all the world was talking, but the ma.n.u.scripts of which were still very rare, especially those of the work of Helye de Borron[7] ... whether by order, or only with permission of the King of Sicily, our Rustician made haste to read, abridge, and re-arrange the whole, and when Edward returned to Sicily he recovered possession of the book from which the indefatigable Pisan had extracted the contents.”
But this I believe is, in so far as it pa.s.ses the facts stated in Rustician's own preamble, pure hypothesis, for nothing is cited that connects Rustician with the King of Sicily. And if there be not some such confusion of personality as we have alluded to, in another of the preambles, which is quoted by Dunlop as an utterance of Rustician's, that personage would seem to claim to have been a comrade in arms of the two de Borrons. We might, therefore, conjecture that Rustician himself had accompanied Prince Edward to Syria.[8]
[Sidenote: Character of Rustician's Romance compilations.]
40. Rustician's literary work appears from the extracts and remarks of Paulin Paris to be that of an industrious simple man, without method or much judgment. ”The haste with which he worked is too perceptible; the adventures are told without connection; you find long stories of Tristan followed by adventures of his father Meliadus.” For the latter derangement of historical sequence we find a quaint and ingenuous apology offered in Rustician's epilogue to Giron le Courtois:--
”Cy fine le Maistre Rusticien de Pise son conte en louant et regraciant le Pere le Filz et le Saint Esperit, et ung mesme Dieu, Filz de la Benoiste Vierge Marie, de ce qu'il m'a done grace, sens, force, et memoire, temps et lieu, de me mener a fin de si haulte et si n.o.ble matiere come ceste-cy dont j'ay traicte les faiz et proesses recitez et recordez a mon livre. Et se aucun me demandoit pour quoy j'ay parle de Tristan avant que de son pere le Roy Meliadus, le respons que ma matiere n'estoist pas congneue. Car je ne puis pas scavoir tout, ne mettre toutes mes paroles par ordre. Et ainsi fine mon conte. Amen.”[9]
In a pa.s.sage of these compilations the Emperor Charlemagne is asked whether in his judgment King Meliadus or his son Tristan were the better man? The Emperor's answer is: ”I should say that the King Meliadus was the better man, and I will tell you why I say so. As far as I can see, everything that Tristan did was done for Love, and his great feats would never have been done but under the constraint of Love, which was his spur and goad. Now that never can be said of King Meliadus! For what deeds he did, he did them not by dint of Love, but by dint of his strong right arm.
Purely out of his own goodness he did good, and not by constraint of Love.” ”It will be seen,” remarks on this Paulin Paris, ”that we are here a long way removed from the ordinary principles of Round Table Romances.
And one thing besides will be manifest, viz., that Rusticien de Pise was no Frenchman!”[10]
The same discretion is shown even more prominently in a pa.s.sage of one of his compilations, which contains the romances of Arthur, Gyron, and Meliadus (No. 6975--see last note but one):--
”No doubt,” Rustician says, ”other books tell the story of the Queen Ginevra and Lancelot differently from this; and there were certain pa.s.sages between them of which the Master, in his concern for the honour of both those personages, will say not a word.” Alas, says the French Bibliographer, that the copy of Lancelot, which fell into the hands of poor Francesca of Rimini, was not one of those _expurgated_ by our worthy friend Rustician![11]
[Sidenote: Ident.i.ty of the Romance Compiler with Polo's fellow-prisoner.]
41. A question may still occur to an attentive reader as to the ident.i.ty of this Romance-compiler Rusticien de Pise with the Messire _Rustacians de Pise_, of a solitary MS. of Polo's work (though the oldest and most authentic), a name which appears in other copies as _Rusta Pisan, Rasta Pysan, Rustichelus Civis Pisa.n.u.s, Rustico, Restazio da Pisa, Stazio da Pisa_, and who is stated in the preamble to have acted as the Traveller's scribe at Genoa.
M. Pauthier indeed[12] a.s.serts that the French of the MS. Romances of Rusticien de Pise is of the same barbarous character as that of the early French MS. of Polo's Book to which we have just alluded, and which we shall show to be the nearest presentation of the work as originally dictated by the Traveller. The language of the latter MS. is so peculiar that this would be almost perfect evidence of the ident.i.ty of the writers, if it were really the fact. A cursory inspection which I have made of two of those MSS. in Paris, and the extracts which I have given and am about to give, do not, however, by any means support M. Pauthier's view. Nor would that view be consistent with the judgment of so competent an authority as Paulin Paris, implied in his calling Rustician a _nom recommandable_ in old French literature, and his speaking of him as ”versed in the secrets of the French Romance Tongue.”[13] In fact the difference of language in the two cases would really be a difficulty in the way of identification, if there were room for doubt. This, however, Paulin Paris seems to have excluded finally, by calling attention to the peculiar formula of preamble which is common to the Book of Marco Polo and to one of the Romance compilations of Rusticien de Pise.
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