Un puente entre oriente y occidente

        I could not find much on Rustichello.  Even his name isn´t sure:  Rustichello o Rusticello Italians call him.  It also appears as Rusticiano or Rustigiello.  In the French manuscript of the Polo´s book, reads Rusticien. By adding that usually accompanies the name, we know his home city: Pisa, in Tuscany.  His date of birth is uncertain too, but we assume it would be about fifteen years older than Marco, so that when they shared captivity in Genoa he would be little less than sixty years. 

            It has been said of him that he was a writer.   At least one book justifies the claim: Compilation Arthurienne or Roman de Roi Artus.  This is a compilation of  Arturs romans.  He was the first Italian to undertake the translation of the rear, although the target language was not Italian but French. I have not read the book but I know that it deals with the knightly adventures of Tristan, of his father Meliadus , of Lancelot and of  Guiron le Courtois.   In the National Library in Paris is a manuscript compilation divided into two volumes: Meliadus de Leonnoys and Gyron le Courtoys.  I have read that the Compilation Arthurienne  is adapted from a manuscript that Edward I of England would have left on their way through Italy in 1271 and 1272 during the Eighth Crusade and that Rustichello  was in his court and he even travel with him on his journey to the Holy Land and was witness of the attempted murder that almost kills the king by the Ismaili assassins. 

           In 1284, at the Battle of Meloria, in which the Genoese and Pisan fleets clashed, Rustichello was captured and taken to Genoa.  When fourteen years later came the Venetians Curzola captive, he was still imprisoned. The rest of the story, you already know it or imagine it.  Somehow he was informed of the stories of Marco Travel.  We do not know who is contacted with who or how collaboration is organized.  Providence has left the stage prepared: it has woven its network so that it gathered in the same space a man of the stories and who can tell them.  Eight or ten months have shared captivity Rustichello and Marco Polo.  In August 1299 Marco is released, two months later, Rustichello.  No records after they saw each other again.  Nor do we know anything about the subsequent fate of the Pisan.  We do not know what he did on arrival in his city, or when or where he died.  Surely he never imagined that it would be by the result of that sporadic, minimal and forced collaboration that today we would remember him.