This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable. And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

If you know a writer, odds are that they've complained to you about how hard it is to find time to actually write. Crafting stories requires concentration, discipline, and often a

decent amount of peace and quiet. This has remained true ever since the first scholar put pen to paper.

And it's always remarkable where, throughout history, people have found the time and space to record their thoughts.

One of the most common places is in prison.

In the 13th century, for example, a Venetian man was captured by the Republic of

Genoa and thrown into a cell. The man in question, who had allegedly fought on the side of their

enemies, was an explorer who had spent 24 years traveling from Europe to Asia. During the months

of his imprisonment, he told stories of his travels to fellow inmates,

one of whom was Rustichello de Pisa, an Italian scholar and author who'd been responsible

for the first Italian versions of several Arthurian legends. And together, the two inmates

began to produce the first record of all the sites the Venetian had seen, the people he'd met,

cultural knowledge that he had gained. The subsequent work became a bestseller, an extremely

influential work of travel writing. Although the authenticity of its stories are often dubious,

the explorer himself is still a household name, Marco Polo.

Now, his co-author, Rustichella, was not the only writer of Arthurian myths who spent

significant time behind bars.

In 15th century, England, a largely unknown man worked quietly behind bars while writing

the most famous version of the Tales of King Arthur, the one that collates

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