It is a fair conjecture that to that remnant Rusticiano of Pisa may have belonged.

We have seen Ramusio’s representation of the kindness shown to Marco during his imprisonment by a certain Genoese gentleman who also assisted him to reduce his travels to writing.  We may be certain that this Genoese gentleman is only a distorted image of Rusticiano, the Pisan prisoner in the gaol of Genoa, whose name and part in the history of his hero’s book Ramusio so strangely ignores.  Yet patriotic Genoese writers in our own times have striven to determine the identity of this their imaginary countryman![5]

[Sidenote:  Rusticiano, a person known from other sources.]

39.  Who, then, was Rusticiano, or, as the name actually is read in the oldest type of MS., “Messire Rustacians de Pise”?

Our knowledge of him is but scanty.  Still something is known of him besides the few words concluding his preamble to our Traveller’s Book, which you may read at pp. 1-2 of the body of this volume.

In Sir Walter Scott’s “Essay on Romance,” when he speaks of the new mould in which the subjects of the old metrical stories were cast by the school of prose romancers which arose in the 13th century, we find the following words:—­

“Whatever fragments or shadows of true history may yet remain hidden under the mass of accumulated fable which had been heaped upon them during successive ages, must undoubtedly be sought in the metrical romances....  But those prose authors who wrote under the imaginary names of RUSTICIEN DE PISE, Robert de Borron, and the like, usually seized upon the subject of some old minstrel; and recomposing the whole narrative after their own fashion, with additional character and adventure, totally obliterated in that operation any shades which remained of the original and probably authentic tradition,” &c.[6]

Evidently, therefore, Sir Walter regarded Rustician of Pisa as a person belonging to the same ghostly company as his own Cleishbothams and Dryasdusts.  But in this we see that he was wrong.

In the great Paris Library and elsewhere there are manuscript volumes containing the stories of the Round Table abridged and somewhat clumsily combined from the various Prose Romances of that cycle, such as Sir Tristan, Lancelot, Palamedes, Giron le Courtois, &c., which had been composed, it would seem, by various Anglo-French gentlemen at the court of Henry III., styled, or styling themselves, Gasses le Blunt, Luces du Gast, Robert de Borron, and Helis de Borron.  And these abridgments or recasts are professedly the work of Le Maistre Rusticien de Pise.  Several of them were printed at Paris in the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries as the works of Rusticien de Pise; and as the preambles and the like, especially in the form presented in those printed editions, appear to be due sometimes to the original composers (as Robert and Helis de Borron) and sometimes to Rusticien de Pise the recaster, there would seem to have been a good deal of confusion made in regard to their respective personalities.