At the time when Humboldt doubted the knowledge of Columbus in respect to Marco Polo, this treasure of the Colombina was not known, and these later developments have shown how such a question was not to be settled as Humboldt supposed, by the fact that Columbus quoted Æneas Sylvius upon Cipango, and did not quote Marco Polo.
Neither does Columbus refer to the journey and strange stories of Sir John Mandeville, whose recitals came to a generation which was beginning to forget the stories of Marco Polo, and which, by fostering a passion for the marvelous, had readily become open to the English knight's bewildering fancies. The same negation of evidence, however, that satisfied Humboldt as respects Marco Polo will hardly suffice to establish Columbus's ignorance of the marvels which did more, perhaps, than the narratives of any other traveler to awaken Europe to the wonders of the Orient. Bernaldez, in fact, tells us that Columbus was a reader of Mandeville, whose recital was first printed in French at Lyons in 1480, within a few years after Columbus's arrival in Portugal.
It was to Florence, in Toscanelli's time, not far from 1420, that Nicolo di Conti, a Venetian, came, after his long sojourn of a quarter of a century in the far East. In Conti's new marvels, the Florentine scholar saw a rejuvenation of the wonders of Marco Polo. It was from Conti, doubtless, that Toscanelli got some of that confidence in a western voyage which, in his epistle to Columbus, he speaks of as derived from a returned traveler.
Pope Eugene IV., not far from the time of the birth of Columbus, compelled Conti to relate his experiences to Poggio Bracciolini. This scribe made what he could out of the monstrous tales, and translated the stories into Latin. In this condition Columbus may have known the narrative at a later day. The information which Conti gave was eagerly availed of by the cosmographers of the time, and Colonel Yule, the modern English writer on ancient Cathay, thinks that Fra Mauro got for his map more from Conti than that traveler ventured to disclose to Poggio.
Toscanelli, at the time of writing this letter to Columbus, had long enjoyed a reputation as a student of terrestrial and celestial phenomena. He had received, in 1463, the dedication by Regiomontanus of his treatise on the quadrature of the circle. He was, as has been said, an old man of seventy-seven when Columbus opened his correspondence with him. It was not his fate to live long enough to see his physical views substantiated by Diaz and Columbus, for he died in 1482.