Did Marco Polo go to China?
In 1271, the merchants Niccolò and Maffeo Polo left their
native city of Venice and set sail for the east. Niccolò and
Maffeo had already done business in Constantinople and in the
Crimea, and they had already visited the lands of the Mongols,
both in Persia and in China. In fact, when they returned to
Europe in 1269 they carried a message from Kublai Khan to the
pope in Rome, together with a request that they bring back
some oil from the lamp that was burning in the Church of the
Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Having delivered the letter, and
fetched the oil, they were now on their way back to the lands
of the East. They had a paiza with them, a small tablet in
gold, which gave them free passage, lodgings and horses
throughout Mongol lands. With them as they left Venice was
also Niccolò’s son, Marco, who was 17 years old at the time.
After a journey which took them to Armenia and along the
caravan trails of Central Asia, they eventually reached Kublai
Khan’s capital at Shangdu in 1275.
Marco Polo was to find particular favor with the Great Khan
who made him a courtier and an official. Marco learned to
speak Mongolian together with several other languages and he
traveled around the vast empire visiting lands which no
European previously had seen. His account of the splendors of
the khan’s palace is particularly famous, together with his
description of Kinsay, the city of Hangzhou in the south, with
its 12,000 bridges, wide roads and magnificent architecture.
Although Marco Polo was trusted by the khan, he was not free
to return to Europe, and it was only when an imperial princess
was to be escorted to the Ilkhanate in Persia that he saw an
opportunity to escape. The Polos returned to Europe in 1295,
twenty-four years after they originally had set sail. The
Polos came back to Venice as wealthy men and the stories Marco
told of his adventures amazed everyone who heard them. He was
known as Il milione, referring to the millions of marvelous
tales he would tell his astonished European audience.
Although the story of Marco Polo’s adventures in the East is
well-known, the documentary evidence in its support is
surprisingly shaky. Polo himself never wrote anything down but
the account of his travels was instead compiled by Rustichello
da Pisa, an Italian author previously known for his romances
about chivalric knights. The two men met when they were taken
prisoners during the war which Venice fought with Genoa in the
last years of the thirteenth-century. Although Rustichello’s
text exists in some 150 different hand-copied versions, there
is no known original manuscript and we are not even sure in
which language the text originally was written. The problem is
that the existing versions different considerably from each
other, with later editions providing far more elaborate
descriptions than earlier ones. A manuscript from Toledo from
the middle of the fifteenth-century is, for example, half
again as long as earlier versions. This has led some scholars
to suggest that instead of being the account of one man’s
travels, the story should be seen as a compilation of many
different sources.
Some have even argued that Marco Polo never actually visited
China. It is striking, for example, how he never mentions
Chinese customs such as foot-binding or tea-drinking, and it
is strange that his place-names consistently are given in
Persian rather than in Mongol or Chinese. It is also peculiar
that no items from Mongolia or China were found in his
possession at the time of his death. This is not, however, a
reason to dismiss the text as such. Despite omissions and
mistakes, the book contains many details which we know from
other sources to be correct. The book is valuable not least
since its relative lack of moralistic judgments contrasts
favorably with accounts of China left by the missionaries
dispatched by the Church. Marco Polo’s book – or the book
associated with a person by that name – had a tremendous
impact on European readers, stirring up elaborate fantasies of
the exotic East. The most famous reader was perhaps
Christopher Columbus who had his own copy of the book – on
which he had scribbled extensive handwritten notes in the
margins (see the picture above).