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Prologue

The world, noble sirs, has lately grown bigger. And shrunk at the same time.

You laugh? Do I seem to talk nonsense? Does the one contradict the other? I shall soon prove it does not by any means.

Look out of the window, gentlemen. What view meets your eyes? The barn, you answer truthfully, and the privy beyond it. And what lies beyond the privy? Heed, if I ask the wench hurrying here with the ale, she will say that beyond the privy is a field of stubble, then Jachym’s homestead, the tar kiln and finally Mała Kozołupa. If I ask our innkeeper—a more worldly man—he will add that beyond Mała Kozołupa is Wielka Kozołupa, then the hamlet of Kocmyrów, the village of Łazy, then Goszcz, and beyond Goszcz there’s Twardogóra, I believe. But heed: more learned fellows with more enlightened minds—like you, for example—know that the world doesn’t end at Twardogóra, either; that beyond it is Oleśnica, Brzeg, Niemodlin, Nysa, Głubczyce, Opava, Nový Jičín, Trenčín, Nitra, Esztergom, Buda, Belgrade, Ragusa, Ioannina, Corinth, Crete, Alexandria, Cairo, Memphis, Ptolemais, Thebes… Well? Isn’t the world growing? Doesn’t it become ever larger?

Yet that still is not the end. Going beyond Thebes, up the Nile—which issues from its source in the Garden of Eden as the River Gihon—we come to the lands of the Ethiopes, and thence, as we know, to barren Nubia, sun-baked Kush, gold-bearing Ophir and the whole of vast Africa Terra, hic sunt leones. And beyond that is the ocean that surrounds all the Earth. But in that ocean, of course, are islands like Cathay, Taprobana, Bragine, Oxidrate, Gynosophe and Zipangu, where the climate is wonderfully fertile and jewels lie around in heaps, as described by the scholar Hugh of Saint Victor and Pierre d’Ailly, and also by Sir John Mandeville, who saw those marvels with his own eyes.

Thus, we have proved that over the course of those few centuries the world has grown markedly. For even if the world hasn’t increased in terms of matter, the number of new names certainly has.

How then, you ask, can we reconcile the claim that the world has also shrunk? I shall tell you and prove it. I only entreat you first not to mock or jibe, for what I shall say isn’t a figment of my imagination, but knowledge gleaned from books. And it doesn’t do to mock books, since their writing is the result of somebody’s arduous labour.