Or did Marco fake the whole thing? A whiff of suspicion has lingered about him ever since…Even now, it is argued that Marco ventured no farther than Constantinople or the Black Sea and cribbed tales from more venturesome Arabs and Persians.
-National Geographic Magazine, May 2001
Having heard for the first time that my adventures have been doubted and looked upon as jokes, I feel bound to come forward and vindicate my character for veracity. (from the Preface)
Some years before my beard announced approaching manhood, or in other words when I was neither man nor boy, but between both, I expressed in repeated conversations a strong desire of seeing the world…(from Chapter 1)
When I was in service of the Turks I frequently amused myself in a pleasure barge on the Marmora which commands a view of the whole city of Constantinople, including the Grand Seignior’s Seraglio. (from Chapter Nine)
We at length arrived on the confines of an immeasurable desert- an immense plain extending on every side of us like an ocean. Not a tree nor a shrub nor blade of grass was to be seen, but all appeared an extreme fine sand mixed with gold dust and little sparkling pearls. (from Chapter 25)
-Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, Rudolph Erich Raspe, 1785
Factitious disorder imposed on self, also known as Munchausen syndrome…for cases of feigned illness not driven by a psychiatric disorder, see Malingering
-Wikipedia
Like the famous Baron, the persons affected have always travelled widely and their stories are both dramatic and untruthful.
-Regis Olry, Literature, Neurology, and Neuroscience
Did Marco Polo really fake the whole thing, as did Raspe in his tall written tales about the Baron, especially about his battles against the Turks in the two Russo-Turkish Wars, and as did the Baron himself in his own tall tales that once back home he told to his fellow German aristocrats, in the words of one of them who frequented his story telling sessions, in order “to ridicule the disposition for the marvellous that he observed in some of his acquaintances”.
So too Marco found a Venetian readership with a ready disposition for marvellous things of the East, egged on perhaps too far by his cellmate and co-author Rustichello da Pisa. And so too did the Nazis, under whom a 1943 film about the Baron’s Adventures- aimed at rivaling Alexander Korda’s 1940 film The Thief of Bagdad for its special effects in color- was made starring the actress and Third Reich-propagandist Ilse Werner as a princess kidnapped into the Seraglio, rescued by the Baron wearing a magic invisibility ring, and carried in his unseen arms past shrieking eunuchs and bumbling harem guards in a madcap Orientalist semi-nude slave girl scene. (For a nudier version, see Terry Gilliam’s 1988 film of the same name with Uma Thurman.)
As Egyptian folktales always end, I know because I was there and I just got back. But if spoken by Marco Polo, the Baron, or someone named Werner, don’t believe a word they tell you. Either they weren’t there and made it all up, or they were there but dreamt it.
Fraulein Werner rescued by Baron Munchausen from the hurma (protected women) in the harem