Marco Polo - The Great Explorer of the Medieval World Documentary

The man known to history as Marco Polo was born around 1254 into a wealthy merchant family in the city of Venice. Marco’s father was Niccolò Polo, a prosperous merchant. The origins of the Polo family are unclear. One tradition suggests that they were originally from Šibenik on the Dalmatian coast of what is now Croatia and that they only relocated to Venice in the early eleventh century. Another study suggests that the family only moved to Venice in the mid-thirteenth century and that Marco was actually born on the island of Korčula near modern-day Dubrovnik. At the time of

Marco’s birth, the Republic of Venice was one of just dozens of Italian city states, though one of the most powerful, dominating the sea-routes of the Adriatic Sea and with extensive trading connections and colonies in the Eastern Mediterranean. Numerous studies have proposed that Marco was actually born in one of Venice’s trading stations or colonies abroad, perhaps even in Constantinople, the medieval name for Istanbul and the capital of the Byzantine Empire at the time. The wider consensus, however, is that Venice itself was his place of birth. According to the traditional account found in The Travels of Marco

Polo, Niccolò and his brother Maffeo left Venice in 1253 on what would become an extensive trading voyage. Early the following year, Niccolò’s pregnant wife gave birth to a boy named Marco after Saint Mark, Venice’s patron saint. Marco’s mother, whose name is unknown, died when her son was still a child. As his father was away on his trading mission, young Marco was brought up by an aunt and uncle. Away from Venice, it is likely that Niccolò Polo would not have even known that his wife was pregnant when he left the city in 1253. Before delving any

further into the life and travels of Marco Polo, it is worth reflecting first on the book from which nearly all of our information on this mercurial Italian traveller is derived. The title of The Travels of Marco Polo, as it is known in English today, was actually something more akin to Book of the Marvels of the World in the original north Italian dialect in which it was written. It was not, as is sometimes suggested, written by Marco Polo himself. Instead it was authored by Rustichello da Pisa, a writer from the city of Pisa in Tuscany. Sometime

around the mid-1280s Rustichello was imprisoned by the Republic of Genoa, which was engaged in an extensive conflict with Pisa during the thirteenth century for control over the island of Corsica. He was still in a prison in Genoa years later when he was joined by Marco Polo, who had himself been detained by the Genoans during a conflict with Venice. Polo was soon released from prison. By that time he had related the stories of his travels across Asia extensively to Rustichello and the Pisan later wrote them up and published them. This was in manuscript form and in

the fourteenth century hundreds of copies in various French and Italian dialects were circulating around Europe, indicating its popularity as a travelogue. Nearly all of what follows is based on The Travels of Marco Polo. Scholars have found no major reasons to dispute the accuracy of what Polo related to Rustichello or how the Pisan writer recounted it in print. The curiosities about the world which Polo encountered in Central Asia and China would have been so unusual to European readers in the late medieval period that he would not have needed to exaggerate in order to make his work

off wide interest. The Venice that Marco Polo grew up in was a thriving commercial centre, with trading interests as far afield as Constantinople, the Black Sea, the Levant and Alexandria in Egypt. The city’s merchants had become rich on the back of acting as the major go-between for goods coming from India and the Far East to the Middle East, and which were then carried to Europe on Venetian merchant vessels. An embryonic banking and insurance system had developed in Venice and other cities like Genoa, Pisa and Florence in the High Middle Ages to facilitate and finance this

extremely lucrative trade. Venice had also become a major naval power in the process, with a huge merchant navy and a substantial fleet of war galleys. Indeed, so powerful were the Venetians that a half a century before Polo was born the Venetians had largely co-opted the Fourth Crusade into conquering Constantinople and for a time occupying much of the lands of the Byzantine Empire. It was only in 1261 that the Byzantines managed to retake their capital and when Marco’s father and uncle had left Venice in 1253 it had been to head east to extend their trading interests

at Constantinople, though they soon relocated northwards to the Italian trading stations in the Crimea. As significant as Venice’s ties to Constantinople and the Eastern Mediterranean were, Marco Polo’s life would be shaped by developments much further to the east. The Mongols, a major tribes-people from the Chinese end of the Asian Steppe, had burst onto the global stage at the beginning of the thirteenth century after a warlord named Genghis Khan had united the divided tribes into a confederation and had begun extensive military campaigns in both China and in Central Asia. By the time of Genghis’s death in

1226, the Mongols had expanded as far west as the Caspian Sea and launched raids into Eastern Europe. This continued under his successors and by the time Marco was born in the mid-1250s, the Mongols were campaigning into the Crimea and Ukraine region and into the Levant against the Muslim powers. They sacked the city of Baghdad in 1258. While the Mongol Empire would soon be divided up amongst the descendants of Genghis Khan, at its peak their combined territories extended from the Black Sea and the Syrian Desert in the west all the way to the Yellow Sea and

the eastern edges of Asia in the east. This all had major implications for European merchants like the Polos. Firstly, the Mongol campaigns had destroyed some of the old powers who had played a major role in bringing Chinese silk and spices from India and the East Indies to the Middle East for merchants from Venice and Genoa to buy them in cities like Alexandria for the European market. But conversely, the creation of a unified Mongolian polity that stretched over more than half of Eurasia led to what is termed the Pax Mongolica, the Mongolian Peace, a period in

which the Mongols facilitated trade along the Silk Roads that led from the Mediterranean all the way east to China. Marco’s father and uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo, were two of the first individuals to see the potential for direct trade to the east under Mongolian rule, in the process cutting out the Muslim merchants who had made the Venetians pay over the odds for their goods in Alexandria for centuries. Hence the two brothers set off east from the Crimea in the early 1260s, travelling to Bukhara in modern-day Uzbekistan, a rich trading city where they lived for three years

and learned various Mongolian dialects. In 1265 they received an invitation from the most powerful of the Mongol lords, Kublai Khan, who ruled China, to head east to visit his court at Khanbaliq, on the site of modern-day Beijing. There the Polos found Kublai to be a wise and intelligent ruler. His mother was also a Nestorian Christian, a sect of Christianity that believed in the separation of Jesus Christ’s human and divine forms, one which had flourished in Asia in medieval times. Thus, Kublai was sympathetic to the Christian Polos and they soon acquired trading concessions from him and

a right of free passage around the Mongol territories. Armed with this, they loaded up on expensive goods like silks and spices, which were often worth more than their weight in gold back in Europe, and headed back west. By 1269 they arrived at the port of Acre in modern-day Israel and then headed on the last leg of their journey home to Venice, arriving there either in late 1269 or into 1270. When Niccolò Polo returned to Venice after a 16-year absence, he met his 15-year old son, Marco, for the first time. Rustichello did not provide much by

way of detail on Marco’s early life in The Travels of Marco Polo and little is known about his childhood. He would have received some practical schooling in basic mathematics and about foreign currencies and commodities, the better to continue in the family mercantile trade in years to come. He would also have had some experience of being at sea by the time his father and brother returned to Venice, such was the manner in which Venetians lived astride the Adriatic Sea. What we can be much surer about is that it was quickly decided in the early 1270s that

when the Polos headed off on another trade mission, Marco would accompany them. There was not long to wait. They left Venice in the spring of 1271 to head for The Holy Land, where Italian mercantile activity was busy at the time to supply Acre and the other Crusader ports for the Ninth Crusade. There the Polos visited Jerusalem while they waited for the election of a new Pope in Rome in the hopes that the new head of the church would provide them with messages to take east to Kublai Khan. Eventually, though, they tired of an inordinately long

election process and decided to strike out east for China once again, though not before receiving word that Pope Gregory X had been elected and that two friars would accompany them on their travels. It was the beginning of a 24-year odyssey. The party of five headed eastwards. They quickly encountered a local Muslim ruler who threatened to imprison them. At that juncture, the two friars, with a healthy regard for their lives and the perils that lay ahead, decided to return home, while the three Venetians continued on, motivated by the belief that religious differences were no obstacle to

trade. As he travelled through the Mongol empire, the young Marco Polo marvelled at the religious freedom he encountered, remarking, “So long as all are faithful and obedient to the khan and give the appointed tribute, and justice is well observed, you may do as you please with your soul.” The party travelled through Armenia and Turkey, where Marco expressed disappointment at not finding Noah’s Ark at its supposed resting place atop Mount Ararat in the Caucasus. The Polos next turned south to Mosul. It is unclear if they visited Baghdad or not, a city that was in decline after

centuries of being the capital of a united Arab Caliphate. From there the next stop was the Persian city of Tabriz. Marco described the unusual method traders in Tabriz used to buy and sell pearls. They would face each other with their hands covered in fabric, and rather than conducting business out loud they would signal the terms of the deal by squeezing each other’s fingers and wrists, ensuring that the price of the deal remained secret to third parties. The Venetians journeyed across Persia to the port of Hormuz, hoping to board a ship and sail to India, from

where they would travel to China by land. However, they found the ships unseaworthy for the crossing of the Indian Ocean and instead decided to go back north. After some idyllic descriptions of the oasis towns in northeastern Persia, Marco went on to recount tales of the Assassins to Rustichello, who subsequently included the details in his book. These were members of a radical Islamic sect who were known for launching fanatical attacks on powerful rulers from their strongholds in isolated mountain fortresses throughout the Middle East. Marco Polo’s descriptions of the Assassins contributed to their notoriety in the Western

world, but by the time of his travels, the Assassins had already been largely eliminated by the Mongols. The Venetian party then turned east into Afghanistan, visiting the site of Balkh, ancient Bactria, which enjoyed a reputation as one of the finest cities in the world until its permanent destruction by Genghis in 1220. While Marco was able to refer to the legendary tales of Alexander the Great in Bactria, the lands further east were only known to him through the stories of the elder Polos. Despite suffering from heat and thirst, the Venetian party rode their trusty camels through

the sands of Central Asia, acquiring much-needed supplies at the oasis towns on the way. Eventually they arrived at the oasis region of Badakhshan, now divided between Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Marco was delighted by the region, known for its trade in precious stones such as rubies and lapis lazuli, the blue gemstone prized for its intense colour. The young Venetian came to know the region well, as he fell ill and the Polos had to stay for a year here until he recovered. It has been speculated that he was suffering from tuberculosis, which he may have contracted as a

child and the symptoms of which only manifested during the stressful journey across Asia. By the time of Marco’s recovery, it was 1273, a full two years after he, his father and his uncle had left Venice. A few weeks later, they faced the formidable obstacle of the Pamir Mountains, which Marco described as “one of the highest places in the whole world,” observing that there were no birds at the high altitude because there was nothing for them to eat. However, once he reached the expansive plateau, nicknamed the roof of the world, he was surprised to encounter a

large lake accompanied by “the best and fattest pasture of the world” on which grazed “multitudes of wild sheep.” The plateau was not as friendly to humans, and the Polos struggled to keep their campfires going in the low-oxygen environment. Two months later, having crossed the Pamirs, they arrived at Khotan on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, where they replenished their dwindling supplies. The arduous trek through the Taklamakan only brought them to the edge of the considerably larger Gobi Desert. The temperatures fluctuated wildly each day in this desolate landscape, from 40 degrees Celsius during the daytime to

below freezing at night. Marco later recollected hearing a phenomenon called the ‘Singing Sands,’ caused by the wind on the dunes, which many interpreted at the time as the souls of those who had died in the desert crying out. At last, the Venetian party arrived among the Tangut, a Tibetan people who had ruled over a sizeable domain in western China before the Mongol conquest. Although he had been confused about the religion of the Buddhists during his earlier encounters with them, Marco expressed admiration for the devotion of the Tangut Buddhists and drew a number of parallels with

Christianity, likening the worship of Buddha statues in different forms to the veneration of saints. He was less impressed by the morality of the laypeople outside the monasteries, observing that the men frequently took up to thirty wives, and those who were too old could be replaced by a younger sister. Marco was more intrigued by the customs in the oasis town of Qumul, now known by its Chinese name of Hami, where the menfolk were so accommodating of guests from afar that they would invite them to sleep with their own wives for the duration of their stay, and

the women were more than happy to oblige. Marco, who was in his late teens at the time, strongly implies that he was the beneficiary of such hospitality, a practice that enabled such remote communities to replenish an otherwise limited gene pool. Not long after leaving Qumul, the Polos spent almost a year carrying out their business at a place which Marco called Campcio, which has been identified with Zhangye in Gansu province in north-western China. The longer he spent in the Mongol Empire, the more he praised its accomplishments. Despite Genghis’s reputation as a blood-thirsty savage in Europe, Marco

later stated, quote, “Genghis Khan was a very upright man: eloquent, and of great valour, great wisdom, and great prowess,” placing him on an equal footing with his childhood hero Alexander the Great. He went as far as to claim that Genghis protected the inhabitants of cities that resisted him after he had conquered them. In his description of Genghis’s life and conquests, Marco refers to a battle between Genghis and Prester John, the legendary Christian ruler in the East, who was defeated and lost his life. Marco’s account claimed that Prester John was also known as the Ung Khan,

a title given to Toghril, a powerful Mongolian chieftain who had been Genghis’s patron before the two men found themselves on opposite sides of a complex civil war back in the formative period of the Mongol polity. Travelling through Mongolia proper, Marco observed the customs and culture of the people here. Although his portrayal of Mongol family life served in part to challenge the European stereotype that the Mongols were savage barbarians, Marco greatly admired the Mongol warrior culture that enabled a small nomadic society to build the largest contiguous empire the world had ever seen in the space of

just a few decades. The Polos eventually arrived at Kublai’s summer palace at Shangdu or the Upper Capital, where the Great Khan spent the three months from June to August. Better known to the English-speaking world as Xanadu, Marco painted a vivid picture of the khan’s marble palace, with its interior walls decorated with images of flora and fauna. These exotic animals could be seen throughout the palace grounds, which stretched for sixteen miles in length. Marco described another palace in the middle of the royal park made entirely from bamboo canes joined together with nails, marvelling at the fact

that the whole palace could be moved around like traditional Mongol tents. Marco’s account of Xanadu gave the impression of a fantastical paradise, with golden drinking vessels that floated from the table to the Great Khan and back again, seemingly without anyone touching them. The description of Xanadu is a particularly famous section from The Travels of Marco Polo, yet the Venetian’s first meeting with the Great Khan actually took place in the palace of Khanbaliq, which Marco claimed to be the largest building he had ever seen, with over 400 rooms in total, located on the site of what

subsequently became the Forbidden City in Beijing. After prostrating themselves before the khan, the three Venetians were received with honour by Kublai, who was curious to learn where Niccolò and Maffeo had been in the years since they last met. The two brothers presented the Great Khan with official documents from Pope Gregory, as well as a gift of the oil from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which particularly delighted Kublai. Niccolò then presented Marco, referring to him as, quote, “my son and your man, whom as the dearest thing I had in this world I have brought with great

peril and ado from such distant lands to present him to you as your servant.” Marco Polo, now 21 years old after four years of travelling, was now in the service of the Great Khan. One of the difficult elements of The Travels of Marco Polo as a book is that Rustichello did not provide clear dates of when events occurred, perhaps because Marco was not around to elaborate on them by the time Rustichello was committing what the Venetian had told him in prison to paper. Consequently, it is sometimes difficult to give a chronological account of the seventeen

years Marco spent in China. The young Venetian claimed that Kublai held him in great favour and he effectively became a member of the khan’s household, learning Mongolian in the process, which was just one of several languages Polo picked up on his travels. When Marco met Kublai in 1274, the Great Khan was already in his sixties. As one of Genghis Khan’s many grandsons, his rise to become supreme khan had not been guaranteed, as the position was chosen by the descendants of Genghis in a quriltai or great assembly. Kublai owed his early rise to his formidable mother,

Sorghaghtani Beki, who promoted the interests of all four of her sons, Mongke, Hulegu, Kublai, and Ariq Boke, all of whom achieved distinction. During the 1250s Kublai proved himself as a military leader, helping his brother Mongke conquer the Kingdom of Dali in southwest China. When Mongke died in 1259, a power struggle followed between Kublai and his brother, Ariq Boke, from which Kublai emerged victorious in 1264. The Great Khan treated his younger brother with magnanimity, though Ariq Boke’s unexpected death two years later fuelled rumours that he had been poisoned. Once he had secured his authority among the

Mongols, Kublai resumed his campaigns in China and these were the backdrop against which Marco spent his time in the Far East. The Mongols had already adopted many Chinese customs, and Marco was impressed by the sophistication of an economy that used paper money. As a travelling merchant, he appreciated how a paper currency that was accepted throughout the empire was much easier and safer to carry compared to the large quantities of gold and silver that European merchants used as their means of exchange. In 1271, Kublai laid claim to the Chinese empire by proclaiming the Yuan Dynasty with

himself as emperor, and by 1279 he had eliminated the final vestiges of resistance from the Song Dynasty in southern China. However, even as he consolidated his power in China, Kublai’s authority elsewhere was in decline, and the empire began to fragment into four distinct entities: the Yuan Dynasty in China and Mongolia, the Golden Horde in Russia, the Chagatid Khanate in Central Asia, ruled by the descendants of Genghis’s second son Chagatai, and the Ilkhanate in the Middle East, ruled by Hulegu and his descendants. After entering the Great Khan’s service, Marco performed many different roles. He spent most

of his time at the khan’s court at Khanbaliq and Shangdu, informing Kublai about Europe and its people and customs. He also travelled extensively throughout the empire on business for the khan, collecting taxes, participating in local administration, and gathering intelligence about the local people. His first mission was to a place called Caragian, a Turkic name for the Kingdom of Dali, which after its conquest by Kublai in 1253 became Yunnan province in southwestern China. During these missions, Marco took notes about the customs and economic potential of each region which he would report back to the khan. These

notes kept his recollections of the lands he visited clear in his mind and they later informed the composition of the famous account of his travels. Marco had a good eye for administration and he left a detailed account of the postal system that allowed Kublai to administer his vast empire from Khanbaliq. If they needed to, the emperor’s messengers could travel up to 250 miles a day on horseback by carrying a token that enabled them to change horses at each post-house. On the main roads leading out from Khanbaliq these post-houses were found 25 miles apart from each

other, all of them accompanied by what Marco later described as a large palatial hotel to cater for the needs of any travellers staying overnight. Each of the post-houses had at least 400 fresh mounts ready for the khan’s messengers speeding across the empire on horseback. Marco claimed that there were 10,000 of these post-stations throughout Kublai’s territories. The Venetian was also struck by the sense of order in Kublai’s empire, remarking on how the urban centres were laid out according to a grid pattern of the kind that would later be used for urban planning in the United States

in the nineteenth century. On his travels across northern China, which Marco calls Cathay after the Khitan people who ruled the region two centuries earlier, Marco described people burning black stones for heat and light, which lasted much longer than wood. He had witnessed the burning of coal, which had been used in China as a source of energy for hundreds of years but which was only beginning to enter use within domestic settings in Europe in the late medieval era and would not be employed industrially for centuries to come. Marco’s description of his journey to Caragian was probably

an amalgamation of two or three journeys he made to what is now southwest China. The first of these trips would have taken place between 1276 and 1280. Marco was now on his own, as he no longer mentions his father and uncle, who may have stayed in Khanbaliq or carried on their business elsewhere in the empire. As he left the capital, the first major landmark he mentions is “a very beautiful stone bridge” over what is now the Yongding River southwest of Beijing, which he claimed to be “300 paces long and eight paces wide.” Built in 1192

and subsequently rebuilt in the seventeenth century, the bridge is known in Chinese as the Lugou Bridge, but thanks to Marco’s detailed description, it is better known among Europeans as the Marco Polo Bridge. In July 1937 it would be the scene of a famous clash between Japanese and Chinese forces that sparked the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Japanese occupation of much of eastern China. It is known as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. As a result of the khan’s extensive infrastructure network, Marco felt comfortable and secure as he made his journey across China to Yunnan. His route

took him through Hebei province, onwards to Shanxi and the city of Taiyuan, which served as the base for the Li family to conquer China and establish the Tang dynasty in the seventh century AD. He continued southwest until eventually reaching the city of Chang’an in Shaanxi province. Now known as Xi’an, the city was one of the ancient capitals of China, and Marco remarked that “many good and valiant kings have reigned over it.” After three days, Marco arrived at the mountainous Hanzhong region in southwest Shaanxi, which served as the base of the warlord Liu Bang for his

conquest of China that led to the foundation of the Han dynasty in 202 BC. His journey continued into Sichuan province and the city of Chengdu, the capital of the state of Shu Han during the Three Kingdoms era in the third century AD, which Marco apparently described as, quote, “once a great and splendid city.” Around five days from Chengdu, Marco arrived in eastern Tibet, now part of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. The region had been terribly devastated by Mongke Khan’s campaign of conquest in the 1250s, though it is far more likely that the destruction of the region

was actually the result of Kublai’s actions here. Whoever was responsible, the desolate region caused Marco unease for the first time since leaving Khanbaliq. He was not only troubled by the wild beasts he encountered, but also by the customs of the locals, which included peculiar marital arrangements. Fathers who wished to marry off their daughters were happy for them to spend the night with travelling merchants, though Marco appeared to be less enamoured by the women of Tibet as those at Hami. Although he was impressed by the products traded in the region, which included spices, silk, amber, and

coral, Marco labelled the locals, quote, “the greatest rogues and the greatest robbers in the world.” He was further repulsed by the religious customs of the natives, writing that they practised “diabolic arts,” including rituals which they believed would influence the weather and bring rain and thunder at any time. After another twenty days on the road, Marco arrived at a city he called Kaidu, now Xichang in southern Sichuan. Having already described the use of paper money earlier in his account, Marco outlined how the people here used blocks of salt as currency. This could be exchanged for gold,

which was plentiful in the region as the people who lived in the mountains could find it easily in the lakes and rivers by simply panning for it. This enabled travelling merchants to make a healthy profit by arbitraging the different rates in the city and the more remote areas of the country. Marco himself may have made some money in this manner. After his trek through Tibet, Marco arrived at the province of Caragian or eastern Yunnan, where he later claimed he encountered a hideous creature which he described as a serpent with two short front legs, a large

head, and a mouth “so large as to swallow a man in one go.” These were crocodiles, the gall of which was used by the Chinese for medicinal purposes, both to heal wounds and to increase fertility among women. This was highly prized and could fetch high prices, while the meat from the crocodile was also sold as a delicacy. Marco continued his journey west to a place he called Uncian, modern-day Baoshan in western Yunnan near the Chinese border with modern-day Myanmar or Burma. In his later account of the local customs, Marco observed that while the men devoted

themselves to hunting and fighting, the women did all the work at home with the assistance of male captive slaves. While this was not too dissimilar to the Mongol practice, Marco reported with bewilderment that whenever a woman gives birth to a child, the man joins the baby in bed and remains there for the next forty days, while the woman goes back to managing the household. While the tale had many doubters among Marco’s contemporaries, modern anthropologists have observed similar practices among native populations in several other communities around the world. After describing the region, The Travels of Marco

Polo goes on to provide a detailed account of a recent battle between the Mongols and the King of Myanmar and Bengal. The whole region, including parts of modern-day Myanmar, had been part of the Kingdom of Dali, which was founded in the early tenth century AD and later became a vassal of the Chinese Song dynasty. Kublai’s conquest of Dali in the 1250s allowed the Mongols to threaten the Song dynasty’s western flank, but the region was subject to frequent rebellions. Amidst the instability of the region, the Burmese attacked the Mongols in 1272. The battle that Marco noted

was fought near Baoshan in 1277, pitting a Mongol cavalry force against a far larger Burmese army of 40,000 with cavalry and infantry as well as 2,000 elephants. Although the elephants caused the Mongol horses to take fright, the Mongols dismounted to fight on foot and managed to drive off the elephants with bows and arrows before engaging in hand-to-hand combat to seal their victory. The Mongols captured 200 of the enemy elephants and presented them as gifts to the khan. This Mongol invasion of Burma took place in the years after the Polos arrived at Kublai’s court and Marco

would have known a lot about how it proceeded from reports reaching the Mongol court. Years later, Marco also described the country of Mien or Myanmar to Rustichello, and the Pisan included these details in his book. According to Marco, the journey to the capital of Myanmar took fifteen days riding, quote, “through vast jungles teeming with elephants, unicorns, and other wild beasts.” Marco does not give any further detail about these unicorns, but he was most likely referring to the Asian rhinoceros, the horns of which were prized for medicinal purposes. After leaving the jungle he arrived at what

he called the city of Mien, the ancient Burmese capital of Pagan. The city was famous for its pagodas, and Marco focused on a pair, one in silver and the other in gold, which were built on the tomb of one of the Burmese kings. He then went on to relate the Mongol conquest of Myanmar, claiming that Kublai had sent forth a large number of court jesters and acrobats reinforced by regular soldiers. After they defeated the Burmese, the Mongols were astonished to see the pagodas and proposed carrying off the gold and silver for the khan, but Kublai

refused since he did not wish to cause resentment among the Burmese by plundering the tomb of one of their great kings. In his description of neighbouring Bengal, which was conquered by the Mongols in 1284, Marco observed the trade not only of spices with India, but also of slave-girls and prisoners of war who were made into eunuchs after being captured. Marco then related his visit to the kingdom of Caugigu or Jiaozhi, in what is now northern Vietnam. Although the Mongols had first invaded the country in 1257 and sacked its capital, forcing the kingdom to submit to

the khan in 1261, Jiaozhi revolted in the late 1270s and sporadic fighting took place over the following decade. Again, these latter events occurred while Marco was in the Far East himself. After Vietnam, Marco began his return journey to Khanbaliq, travelling through parts of eastern Yunnan and Sichuan. At Kuizhou, located east of the modern-day city of Chongqing, Marco encountered fearsome lions who threatened to attack travelling merchants during the night, forcing them to sleep on a raft on the river. In order to defend themselves from these beasts, Marco claimed that the men would train a pair of

wolves to work with them to kill the lions. It took twelve days for Marco to go from Kuizhou to Chengdu, where he retraced his steps back to the capital. After the account of his travels into southwest China, Myanmar, Bengal, and Vietnam, there is then an itinerary of the Venetian’s travels into eastern China presented in The Travels of Marco Polo, although, once again, Marco probably made several such trips which were later presented as one long journey by Rustichello to make the account more readable. While the beginning of the journey took him over the Marco Polo Bridge,

at the city of Zhuozhou in Hebei province he turned due south to Hejian, and thence to Cangzhou, where he observed the production of pure white salt, which was exported to other parts of the empire, making its inhabitants wealthy and generating tax revenues for the khan. He probably followed the course of the Grand Canal until he arrived at Jining, which Polo described as a busy river port with one channel flowing west to the province of Cathay, or northern China, and another flowing east towards the province of Manzi, a term that Marco used to describe the recently-conquered

Song Dynasty in southern China. Continuing on a southeastern course, Marco eventually reached the Huai River, which in Marco’s time shared a course with the Yellow River, which Marco called by its Persian name, Karamoran. The Yellow River marked the boundary between the former Jin empire in northern China, conquered by the Mongols in 1234, and the Southern Song, which was not fully conquered until 1279. The Travels of Marco Polo went on to give an account of the Mongol conquest of the Southern Song, whose ruler was referred to as Facfur, a term used by Persian and Arab historians

meaning ‘Son of God,’ roughly corresponding to the Chinese Tianzi, or ‘Son of Heaven.’ In 1268, Kublai dispatched a general named Bayan Hundred Eyes at the head of a cavalry force of up to 200,000 men supported by a river fleet, to invade the Song empire. Marco describes how Bayan had requested submission from five cities on his path, all of which refused. The Mongol commander simply bypassed them and continued on his march, knowing that Kublai was following behind with reinforcements. Once he arrived at the sixth city that refused to submit, he stormed the city and massacred the

inhabitants. Bayan took several other cities in quick succession and headed straight for the capital, the city of Hangzhou which Marco called Quinsay. The Venetian explorer painted a sympathetic portrait of Facfur, otherwise the Song emperor Duzong, who reigned between 1264 and 1274. Marco claimed that the emperor took care of 20,000 young children a year who were abandoned on the streets by poor mothers who could not afford to bring them up. The children were either adopted by rich childless families or remained in the care of imperial nurses until they were old enough to be married to each

other in a ceremony presided over by the emperor. As Bayan approached Hangzhou, Marco claimed that the Song emperor fled the city by ship and sailed towards India, while his empress defiantly attempted to defend the city before eventually submitting to the Mongols, after which she was treated with great courtesy at Khanbaliq. In fact, Duzong died in 1274 and was succeeded by his three-year-old son, Emperor Gong, with Duzong’s aunt Empress Dowager Xie acting as regent. In 1276, after a show of resistance, the dowager led the child emperor to Bayan’s camp and submitted. The emperor’s two younger brothers

escaped by sea to Fujian province, but after Song forces were defeated in 1279 in a naval battle on the south coast of China, the Song prime minister took the uncrowned seven-year-old Emperor Zhao Bing in his arms and jumped into the sea. After arriving at Xiangyang in Hubei province, Marco, his father and his uncle allegedly played an important part in bringing the city under Mongol rule. According to Marco’s account, while the rest of the Song empire had surrendered to Kublai, the fortress at Xiangyang continued to hold out for three years. The Great Khan, in his frustration,

turned to the three Venetians and asked them if they had any ideas to take the city. The Venetians informed the khan of European mangonels, a type of siege engine or catapult which could throw heavy rocks against the walls of enemy fortresses and bring them down. According to Marco, Kublai then ordered the construction of three of these machines, which were brought by river to the besieging army at Xiangyang. The fortress did not hold out for long against these new weapons and soon surrendered to the Mongols. Here we see Polo’s capacity for deception though. Nearly everything in

this tale, as he would have related it to Rustichello, was untrue. The siege of Xiangyang actually ended in 1273, two years before the Polos arrived at Kublai’s court in 1275. The Mongols did prevail in the siege after introducing new siege engines to their armies, but both Mongol and Chinese sources credit Arab siege engineers with the innovation. Polo was claiming credit for something which he had nothing to do with. As Marco’s travels continued in China, he arrived at a place called Singiu, a city which he described as standing, quote, “on the longest river in the world.”

This might have been Zhenzhou in Jiangsu province, near the estuary of the Yangtze River, the longest river in China and the third-longest in the world, surpassed only by the Nile and Amazon Rivers. Marco suggested to Rustichello that the amount of commercial shipping and naval traffic on the river was greater than that of all Europe’s rivers combined. On his way to Hangzhou, Marco went past “the large and splendid city” of Changzhou, where a massacre had recently been inflicted on the city by Bayan’s army after the city’s garrison resisted more fiercely than anticipated. Of the “large and

very splendid city of Suzhou,” measuring 40 miles in circumference, he remarked that there were 6,000 stone bridges and an unimaginable number of inhabitants there. He went on to observe that, quote, “if they were a warlike nation, the men of the province of Manzi would conquer all the rest of the world.” Yet instead of focusing on war, the people here preferred to be merchants, craftsmen, and scholars. Marco’s remarks reflect the reputation of the Song as the imperial dynasty that took China to unparalleled heights of cultural accomplishment but struggled to defend itself from successive invasions from the

north. After passing through some other cities, Marco arrived at Hangzhou, which he considered to be, quote, “without doubt the finest and most splendid city in the world.” He evidently gave a detailed description of the city to Rustichello. It was surrounded by water, with hundreds of bridges to allow people to get around, a layout that would have doubtlessly reminded Marco of his native Venice. The city had many squares and markets filled with all sorts of produce, while a large lake dominated the southern side of the city, the famous West Lake, around which wealthy people built their

mansions. Of the lake itself, Marco claimed that a “voyage on this lake offers more refreshment and delectation than any other experience on earth.” The Venetian’s praise of the city extended to its women, and he is likely to have partaken of the services of the city’s courtesans on more than one occasion during several visits there. Yet, for all the wonders of Hangzhou and his extolling of its virtues, Marco noted that it was under heavy military occupation and a strict curfew was enforced by the Mongol authorities. As much as Marco found much to admire in Kublai Khan’s

China, he did not intend to live the remainder of his life there. During their stay in China, the Polos had requested leave to return to Venice on several occasions, but Kublai found them useful and was reluctant to let them go. The opportunity finally came in 1291, when Kublai’s great-nephew Arghun, the ruler of the Ilkhanate in Persia, sought a wife from Mongolia. Kublai obliged by sending a princess named Kököchin to Persia accompanied by three Mongol nobles, but the outbreak of civil war in the west prompted them to return to Khanbaliq. By now it was 1292, and

Kublai instead ordered the Polos to escort the party to Persia by sea. After travelling down the eastern coast of China via Hangzhou and the provinces of Zhejiang and Fujian, where Marco claimed they found a lost community of Christians who worshipped in secret but were allowed to practice openly after petitioning the Great Khan, the party arrived at the port of Quanzhou, which Marco refers to by the Arabic name of Zayton. Here Kublai had arranged for them to have a fleet of 14 ships waiting. Before the subsequent passage to India is related in The Travels of Marco

Polo, there is a section which digresses to describe the islands to the east of China, chief among which was Cipangu, or Japan. As Marco related it to Rustichello, the ruler of Japan lived in a palace covered with solid gold, a description that two centuries later would inspire Christopher Columbus to search for a western route to this wealthy country in a quest to claim its legendary wealth for the Spanish kingdom. Kublai was also eager to get his hands on Japan’s wealth and sent two expeditions to conquer the islands. After the first attempt failed in 1274, a

second campaign was launched in 1281 but ended in disaster in August when a typhoon – the legendary kamikaze or divine wind – destroyed much of the Mongol fleet and forced the khan to abandon the campaign. Marco describes how a small band of Mongols left behind in Japan managed to seize a local fort and hold on to it for several months before a peace settlement was negotiated. These events occurred while Polo was in the east, so while he did not himself visit the Japanese islands, they would have been a subject of much conversation at the court

of Kublai Khan in the 1270s and 1280s. After leaving Quanzhou, Marco, his father and uncle travelled 1,500 miles into the South China Sea to the kingdom of Champa, roughly corresponding to the southern half of Vietnam. Their subsequent journey through the East Indies is difficult to trace. Mention is made in The Travels of Marco Polo of the great island of Java 1,500 miles southeast of Champa, which the Venetian claimed to be the largest island in the world, but the description seems to be more appropriate for Borneo. He also referred to a Lesser Java, now the Indonesian

island of Sumatra, stating that while Kublai claimed authority over the island its rulers remained independent. After sailing through the straits of Malacca, the Polos stopped off at Ceylon, the pre-modern name for Sri Lanka, before sailing around the southern tip of India and up its western coast. There the Polos allegedly attempted to find the tomb of the Apostle St Thomas, said to have been martyred in India and buried near Madras. The Travels of Marco Polo claims that the journey across the Indian Ocean took 18 months and that by the time the party finally arrived at the

port of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf only 18 of the initial party of 600 that left China were still alive. We can probably assume that Marco was once again exaggerating here. Upon their arrival, Princess Kököchin discovered that Arghun Khan, her intended husband, was already dead. She was therefore married to his young son, Ghazan. After remaining at the Persian court for nine months, the Polos were allowed to return to Venice by land. On the way, they learned of Kublai’s death in the Far East in February 1294. As the Polos passed through the kingdom of Trebizond in

northern Turkey, the corrupt local authorities demanded a large quantity of their wealth and the valuable goods they had brought with them before they were allowed to continue their journey. They eventually arrived at Venice in 1295, their long hair and Mongol kaftans making them an object of curiosity among their compatriots. When they returned to their house, they were turned away as strangers by relatives who had moved in and taken possession under the impression that the three men were all dead. After all, it was 24 years since they had left the city. When Marco departed he was

around 17 years of age. He returned a man in his early forties. Despite this, nothing the Polos told their compatriots about their adventures in the service of the Great Khan was believed until they produced evidence of their wealth by displaying the priceless gemstones sewn into their kaftans. The Polos returned to Venice at a time when the city was engaged in war with its maritime rival Genoa. Despite his history of serving Kublai Khan and his adoption of Mongol customs, Marco remained a proud Venetian and sponsored and captained a Venetian ship. When a Venetian fleet was defeated

at the Battle of Korčula in September 1298, Marco was taken prisoner. As an esteemed Venetian figure, and a wealthy one after returning home from the Far East, Marco was allowed to spend his captivity in relative comfort while his Genoan captors sought to organise a valuable ransom for his release. It was during this time that he met Rustichello of Pisa and began telling him about his many years of travel. We would probably know nothing about Marco Polo and his father and uncle today had Rustichello not recognised how extraordinary his story was and begun writing down what

would become The Travels of Marco Polo. The book is often disjointed and incomplete, with unfinished sentences and abrupt shifts in the narrative, and no two manuscripts are the same. Despite this, Marco’s account would become more influential than any other European account of the Far East, influencing subsequent generations of merchants and explorers who dreamed of finding new routes to China and Japan, the lands described so vividly in the account of Polo’s many years of travel. Genoa and Venice soon made peace in May 1299, and three months later Marco was released from prison. He returned to Venice,

where his family had acquired a large palazzo. There, in 1300, already in his mid-forties, he married a Venetian woman named Donata, with whom he had three daughters. By this time his father Niccolò was dead, but he continued to work with his uncle Maffeo in the family’s trading company until the latter’s death around 1310. By then Marco was in his mid-fifties and had inherited most of the family’s assets. No longer a traveller and adventurer, he was more focused on increasing his already substantial wealth. By the early 1320s, Marco’s tales seemed increasingly fantastical to his fellow Venetians,

who knew him primarily as a sedentary merchant of their city. According to legend, whenever he walked the streets of the city, he was followed by children shouting, “Mister Marco, tell us another lie!” Another account, this one written by a Dominican friar named Jacopo d’Acqui, relates how after Marco fell seriously ill in 1323, his friends urged him to admit that the tales he had told for so many years were made up. The bedridden man replied, “Friends, I have not written down half of those things I saw.” He would never recover from his illness, and he died

on the 9th of January 1324 at the age of 69. Marco Polo enjoys a legacy as one of the greatest travellers in world history. A native of the Venetian merchant republic, Marco joined his father and uncle on their journey to Kublai Khan’s court as a teenager, and would serve the Great Khan for seventeen years, during which he travelled extensively throughout China, making detailed observations of local societies, economies, customs, and religious beliefs. After returning home after 24 years of travel, his participation in the Battle of Korčula proved a stroke of fortune as it introduced him to

Rustichello of Pisa, who helped him immortalise his travels. The Travels of Marco Polo soon became a literary sensation, with dozens of manuscript copies of it from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries attesting to its popularity in Italy and France, while the printing revolution thereafter brought many new readers across Europe. It would inspire future explorers and also offered a template for the burgeoning genre of anthropological studies of foreign societies in early modern Europe. Ultimately his story is one of strange paradoxes. The travels of the Polo family were made possible by the brief peace which existed across Asia

during the era of Mongol rule that followed from decades of brutal Mongol war and conquest. Soon Central Asia and the Middle East would collapse back into warring states and rival powers, blocking the route of Europeans to the east once again. With that, new sea routes to the lands Polo had described would be sought after. Hence, in his own way Polo was instrumental in opening the European mind to the possibility of new worlds to explore. What do you think of Marco Polo? Do you believe that he gave an accurate account of his travels and his many

years of service at the court of Kublai Khan, or might he have embellished what he related to Rustichello of Pisa quite a bit? Please let us know in the comment section and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.