Columbus also learned important lessons about the East from the still unpublished work of Marco Polo, which was circulating in Genoa in manuscript. Although Polo was Venetian by birth, he had an important connection to Columbus’s hometown: he had been captured by the Genoese in the Battle of Curzola in 1298, and it was while he was imprisoned in Genoa that he regaled a cellmate, a man named Rusticello, with the tales of his travels in the East.
