One Translator, Two Translations: Contextualizing Marco Polo's "Moving Mountain" Episode in Francesco Pipino's Translation of Il Milione and in his Chronicon

In this essay we focus on one particular instance of Marco Polo's Travels in the Latin Francesco Pipino tradition, that of the long version of the "Moving Mountain" episode. All major Polo versions, Latin or vernacular, contain a short version of the episode of the "Moving Mountain," which tells the story of an exemplary Christian who is able to move a mountain due to his strong religious belief and thereby converts Muslims in the Middle East. However, half a dozen of the more than sixty manuscripts of Francesco Pipino's Latin translation of Marco Polo's Travels also contain a substantially longer version of the "Moving Mountain" episode. This long version also appears in Pipino's Chronicon, albeit in a stylistically and lexically different form, which survives in only one manuscript copy, located at the Biblioteca Estense at Modena (MS lat. 465). This essay provides a working edition of the long version of the "Moving Mountain" episode on the basis of all Pipino manuscripts containing it as well as a transcription of the episode in Pipino's Chronicon. This will serve as a basis for comparison with vernacular versions of the "Moving Mountain" such as, for example, the Franco-Italian and Venetian versions. Our microlevel parallel reading of one episode will bring to the fore major questions relating to Marco Polo research, such as the temporal sequence of the different vernacular versions and the relationship to these texts of Francesco Pipino's Latin text.