Note 6 — Chapter I
Reading edition
Marsden remarks upon this date as evidently wrong. Indeed, it is given quite differently in different early editions of the travels. Marsden thinks it should be 1281. This is the date assigned to the invasion by the Chinese books. The older Japanese annals place it in 1284. In the chapter of Marco Polo which follows the one above quoted, and which is mainly devoted to the islands of southeastern Asia, he seems to ascribe to the Japanese the custom of eating their prisoners of war—a mistake which, as his English translator and commentator observes, might easily arise from transferring to them what he had heard of the savage inhabitants of some of the more southern islands.
The Mongol invasion took place in the fourth year of Kōan [A. D. 1281].—K. M.