Rustichello convinced Marco to put a few of his stories in writing, and he above all others is responsible for the fact that anyone in our day knows who Marco Polo was. Of course, he also takes the blame for the egregious lack of proper grammar and the narrative gaps that have so aggravated scholars ever since. Although they were both speakers of pre-Italian Latin dialects, the popular language of the day for adventure stories was French, so Rustichello wrote in French. Unfortunately Rustichello hadn’t quite mastered the language’s syntax or spelling so the text was a bloody mess of mixed tenses and mangled sentences from the get-go, making it virtually impossible to decipher what parts of the stories are taken from Marco’s own experiences or gleaned from stories he gathered along the way. All the same, Bergreen does a remarkable job of debunking the debunkers to establish once and for all that Marco did indeed do as he said, if not exactly as Rustichello wrote it. He did travel to China, he did serve Kublai Khan for seventeen years traveling throughout the empire gathering information. Asked on his deathbed to renounce his “fables” Marco replied: “Friends I have not written down the half of those things that I saw.”