Polo, Marco

(1254–1324), Venetian trader and explorer. Marco Polo, born into a Venetian trading family with Eurasian connections, went along with family members overland to Mongol China, where he spent some seventeen years (1275–1292) and may have held some official position. He traveled extensively (mostly by sea), and finally returned to Italy in 1295. Shortly thereafter, while a prisoner of war of the Genoese, he dictated his memoirs to a fellow prisoner who also happened to be a writer of romances, and who may have embellished what he heard considerably. There also exist several alternative versions in a variety of languages (the original was in Old French), which vary considerably in detail and in overall coverage. In any case, the memoirs were an immediate sensation, and few books have been more translated or have had as great an impact upon the European imagination as have Marco Polo's travels.

During Marco Polo's time, most of Eurasia was divided up among various competing khanates, successors to a unified Mongol empire. The largest was Mongol China, which included a substantial part of Central Asia as well as what is now China. Marco Polo's account naturally contains extensive information about it since he spent most of his time there. What most impressed him, besides daily life at the exotic court of Khubilai Khan (1215–1294), was the sheer wealth of much of the society that he saw. He makes this clear in his description of the former Song dynasty capitalof Hangzhou (called Kinsay, from a Song term designating its status as a "temporary" capital after the Song loss of northern China). According to Marco, the sheer well-being of the inhabitants and level of economic activity there—in its many markets, for example, frequented daily by more people than lived in any Italian city—was almost beyond belief. It was Marco Polo's descriptions of the wealth of the East, above all, that drew European attentions during the fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Age of Exploration, when Marco Polo's book was required reading for anyone interested in the East, including Columbus.

A miniature painting from Maudeville's Book of Marvels shows Marco Polo before Kubilai Khan. (BETTMANN/CORBIS)

In addition to China, Marco or his family visited the other khanates of the Mongolian world, including the Golden Horde, which ruled Russia, the Russian steppe, the Volga basin, and associated areas; the Il-Khanate of Iran, through which young Marco traveled on the way to China and by which he returned; and the domains of the Chagatai house in Turkistan, also crossed during Polo's outbound journey. He also heard of, or personally touched on, a great many other areas as well. For example, in some official capacity, he not only visited southwest China and Yunnan, an area which had only recently been made a part of China by Mongol conquest, but also Burma, invaded several times by the Mongols. He left behind as a result a valuable firsthand account that is the earliest detailed European notice of the area. He was also the first European writer to mention Japan, although he did not visit it. Before returning to Europe, Marco Polo not only visited Manzi, or south China, but also sailed through insular southeast Asia, including Java, the Indian Ocean, and Persian Gulf, then made a final return lap through Il-Khanate domains, the empire of Trebizond (on the southeastern shores of the Black Sea), and Byzantium.

In addition to providing often quite accurate factual information about the countries that he visited, Marco Polo's memoirs are a treasure trove of legend. They speak at length of Prester John, the supposed Christian king of the East whose realm was a primary target of early explorers in later centuries. He also repeats many interesting travelers' tales about various superstitions associated with the deserts of Central Asia. There is, for example, the Island of Women, one of a pair of mythical islands divided by sex, or the Dry Tree that had stood since ancient times in an immense plain. Some of the travelers' tales, like that of the Dry Tree, were of great antiquity and for that reason are of great interest to folklorists.

In all of this, perhaps the most valuable information of all is Marco Polo's independent testimony on how Mongol China actually worked. Like the Persian historian Rashid ad-Din (1247–1318), he describes a regime more Mongolian than Chinese, one in which Khubilai and his court moved with the seasons in the traditional Mongolian way and engaged in typical Mongolian occupations while doing so, including much-loved hunting.

Marco Polo's descriptions of China and other parts have always seemed a little larger than life to some, and of late there has been a major effort to discredit him. Marco Polo's book does have its problems, but this effort is largely based upon a misappraisal of the environment he describes. It was not very Chinese, but if Marco preserves a Turkic nickname for a Chinese city, this was because he lived in a heavily Turkicized environment. Similarly, if he was thinking in Persian much of the time, this is also only to be expected given the dominance of Persian culture at the Mongol court.

Franke, Herbert. (1966) "Sino-Western Contacts under the Mongol Empire." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society: Hong Kong Branch, 6: 49–72.

Pelliot, Paul. (1959–1973) Notes on Marco Polo. 3 vols. Paris: Impremerie Nationale, Librairie Adrien-Maisonneuve.

Rachewiltz, Igor de. (1999) "F. Wood's Did Marco Polo Go To China? A Critical Appraisal by I. de Rachewiltz." Retrieved 6 February 2002, from: http://rspas.anu.edu. au/eah/Marcopolo.html.

Yule, Henry, and Henri Cordier. ([1903–1920] 1975) The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian. 2 vols. Reprint ed. Amsterdam: Philo Press.