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MARCO POLO
Day after day during 1297 and 1298, an odd performance took
place in the jail in Genoa. There, a sturdy man in his early
forties told of his travels while another copied down his words.
His stories captivated other prisoners and his jailers, and leading citizens of Genoa sometimes came to listen, too.
He explained how he had traveled for almost twenty-five years
and thousands of miles to the east. He described the gold and
silver pagodas of Burma, the shark-charmers who protected the
pearl divers of Ceylon, and the cannibals of Sumatra. Most astonishing were his stories of the country farthest to the east:
Cathay. He said it was the greatest and wealthiest empire the
world had ever known with the most powerful ruler in history.
At first, his amazed listeners didn’t believe him. But the facts,
figures, and countless details shared by the traveler overwhelmed the listeners and made them believers. They thought
that his story would be the most marvelous ever published.
And so it was. The man was Marco Polo, a merchant of Venice,
and the book he dictated was Il Milione, or as it came to be
known in English, The Travels of Marco Polo. He was a prisoner
for nearly three years, having been captured commanding a
galley in a battle between the Genoese and Venetians, probably
in 1298.
When the cities declared a truce in 1299, authorities released
Marco Polo and he went home, bearing the manuscript that recounted the journey he had made with his father and uncle to
the court of Kublai Khan between 1271 and 1295. But the
people who had disputed his stories when he returned to Italy
were still reluctant to believe him. Even after they began to
copy and widely distribute his manuscript across Europe, most
readers regarded Marco as a teller of tall tales. How could anyone believe stories of a city so large that it had 12,000 bridges,
of black stones and a liquid that burned, of a kind of pony express with 10,000 stations and 300,000 horses, and of a land
to the north where it was night all winter and day all summer?
Only a handful of people paid attention at first, but that group
included explorers, geographers, and mapmakers, who took
note of Marco’s detailed descriptions of people and places.
Many years later, when the invention of the printing press
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spread the book across Europe in the fifteenth century, Marco’s
stories spurred people’s hopes and fed their dreams. Ordinary
readers were thrilled by his stories of the gold and spices he
had seen in the cities of the East.
A sea captain from Genoa named Christopher Columbus
dreamed he might reach the lands of spices and gold by sailing
west. Columbus had read Marco’s Travels. In fact, he made
notes on seventy pages of a Latin edition of the book, which is
now in Seville, Spain. The Travels of Marco Polo stimulated
Columbus’s ambitions and imagination. In 1474, the Italian
geographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli sent a map to Columbus
to study. Toscanelli was the astronomer and mathematician
who had determined the locations of Zipangu (Japan) and the
Indies based on Marco Polo’s descriptions.
A few other thoughtful men began to realize that Marco had
brought from Asia something more valuable than gold and
spices. For Europe, knowledge about other civilizations was
more important than the discovery of gold and spices. While
later explorers such as Columbus and James Cook touched the
coasts of unknown lands, Marco Polo described an entire continent.
He brought back a wealth of information - not only regarding
mountains and deserts, goods, crafts, and inventions, but also
governments, religions, and customs. He described the Hindu
Brahmins, Chinese, Buddhists, and an emperor, Kublai Khan,
who tolerated all religions.
Marco Polo’s journey changed Europe. After Marco’s account of
his voyage, no well-read European could believe that his culture
led the world. Marco had demonstrated that much of the vast
outside world overflowed with both ideas and wealth.
China in the thirteenth century was richer and more civilized
than Europe. Paradoxically, though, the reason Marco could
journey overland to China and view its treasures was that the
Chinese were no longer able to keep him out, as they would
have done earlier and later. At that time, Mongol warriors ruled
Asia. Although most people thought the Mongols were ruthless
killers of their Christian enemies, the Mongols actually were
quite tolerant of foreigners and most religions. Kublai Khan
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MARCO POLO
himself was intensely curious about the West and regarded
Marco Polo’s uncle and father as his personal envoys to the
pope.
Khan hoped that the Polo party would promote world peace - or
at least more vigorous trade. For a time, trade did flourish, but
then a wholly different result came to pass. Because of his
book, Marco made people curious about new countries, people,
and ideas. His manuscript lit the way to that great rebirth of interest in the world and sparked the Renaissance.
Marco’s book is filled with vivid writing and evocative detail:
“The multitude of tigers makes traveling dangerous unless a
number of persons go in company. Many come here to have
their bodies ornamented by puncturing with needles . . . the
annual revenue to His Majesty amounted to 16,800,000
ducats.” John Man, one of Marco’s biographers, noted that the
story was also a real-life fairy tale, in which a father plucked an
ordinary teenager from his home and took him on an adventure. In a civilization of unimaginable splendor, the richest and
most powerful man in the world became his mentor and sent
him off on missions across the empire. When the writer returned home as a man of wealth and power, few believed his
tales. But in the end, his book brought him fame, respect, and
a place in history.
The book also left many unanswered questions. The original
manuscript was lost, and the 134 copies that survived have
many discrepancies. Marco was a merchant, not a scholar; he
was more interested in facts and finery than in ideas or innovations that didn’t involve commerce or warfare. For example, he
had no interest in the importance of the Chinese invention of
printing. While the descriptions of the lands, people, and customs he saw are rich with detail, he shared little about his own
life during his twenty-four-year journey, or how he and his fellow travelers felt as they faced starvation, freezing
temperatures, and other dire circumstances. But those gaps allow readers to fill in the story with conjectures and speculations
that make the tale even more intriguing. That is the power of
the book.
Here is Marco Polo’s story.
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