The Travels of Marco Polo
The account of Asia that the Venetian merchant Marco Polo dictated in a Genoese prison in 1298 after some twenty-six years in the East. Its third book describes the coasts of India, including a shrine of St Thomas in the province of Maabar.
Read the text at gutenberg.org ↗Volume 2, with Book 3 on India (Project Gutenberg) ↗
The prologue says that Marco Polo spent twenty-six years in various parts of the world and that in 1298, as a prisoner at Genoa, he had Rusticiano of Pisa, a fellow prisoner, put the whole into writing. It presents the book as a record of what he had seen and of what he had heard on good authority. Yule’s introduction argues that the Old French text is the source of all the other versions.
Book 3 follows the sea route home from China by way of India. Chapter 18 describes the place “where lieth the body of St. Thomas the Apostle”, a small town in the province of Maabar visited by Christian and Muslim pilgrims, and gives the story of the saint’s death as the Christians who kept the church told it. Polo does not name the town. Yule’s note identifies it with Mylapore, now part of Chennai. See the Apostle Thomas and the Christians of India.
Cited in
- AD 52, traditional date