HFM 058 –
Explorers that Pushed the Boundaries of the
Known World, Part 1: Marco Polo – Opening
Europe’s Window to the East
Michael Rank: This is the History in Five Minutes Podcast, the #1 podcast for learning
about anything in history in no time at all! I’m your host, Michael Rank.
Today’s topic is Explorers that Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World, Part 1: Marco
Polo – Opening Europe’s Window to the East.
We’ll be starting another series today about travelers and explorers, so we’re going to be
doing this for the next five episodes partly because I am about to finish an Ebook on
travelers and explorers which I’ll talk about more at the end of this podcast. It will be out
on Amazon and Kobo and other Ebook platforms in early March which if you’re listening to
this in the future is March 2014.
Let’s set the stage. In 1295, three strange men arrived in Venice. While they spoke with
the regency of Italian dialect and claimed to be residents of the city who had returned from
long journey, nobody recognized them, not even their supposed relatives. They bore long
beards of a style that belonged to the barbarians of the East, looking Mongolian or Tartar.
Their skin was bronze after years exposed to the elements even more burnt that the typical
Venetian sailor. Legend has it that the true identities of these men were not confirmed until
the three, one is in his early middle ages and the other a generation older, sliced open the
seams of their ragged clothing and out spilled rubies, diamonds, pearls, sapphires, and
emeralds from across the farthest reaches of India, China, and Mongolia. With these riches
piled up at their feet, the relatives of Niccolo, Maffeo, and Marco Polo received them back
with open arms.
Marco Polo enjoys a legacy that is arguably the greatest of any medieval figure, beyond any
pool game you’ve ever played. While he was by no means the first European to reach China
since his father and his uncle did a generation ago, making the young Polish journey
possible in the first place, his account, The Travels of Marco Polo, popularized knowledge of
India and Asia across the continent. At the time, people were depending on accounts from
Pliny the Elder or Herodotus or others. The reason this was possible is because Polo came
of age when Europe was beginning to rediscover the rest of the world. It had largely been
self-contained since the fall of the Roman Empire and the collapse of its economy, but ever
since the Crusades of a century earlier, interest in the Middle East and Asia grew.
Italian merchants ventured beyond the boundaries of Europe to take advantage of the
growing interest in spices, jewels, clothing, and silks that the Crusaders brought back
earlier. Other factors such as the Mongolian Conquest opened up the world. Since Genghis
and his sons conquered everything between China and Europe, one power controlled
everything on the Silk Road, and as a result, it was now safer to explore between these
domains than it ever was before. In fact, a few generations earlier, there was a Chinese
monk named, Rabban Bar Sauma, that did travel from China all the way to Europe to try to
forge a military alliance between Mongolia and Europe against the Islamic caliphate but we’ll
have to save that for another time.
Marco’s father and uncle were successful jewel merchants in Venice and spent considerable
time traveling to and trading with Asian countries. Niccolo and Maffeo Polo first arrived in
China in 1261 and there they nurtured a relationship with Kublai Khan, ruler of China and
HFM 058 –
Explorers that Pushed the Boundaries of the
Known World, Part 1: Marco Polo – Opening
Europe’s Window to the East
Mongolia. In 1271, when the 17-year-old Marco Polo set out with his father and uncle on
their travel to Asia to meet again with Kublai Khan, he was to experience a world he could
have never expected. They first stopped in Acre, the last remaining possession of the
Crusader States of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and then they headed East across Persia,
Afghanistan and the rest of the Silk Road to Central Asia.
The travelers finally reached the dazzling summer palace of Xanadu which is located
Northwest of Beijing across the Great Wall 3-1/2 years after leaving Venice. Marco was
awestruck. He describes the court as the ‘greatest that ever was seen with a hall that could
sit six thousand diners and surrounded by a wall whose perimeter was 4 miles.’ We are told
in his travels that Kublai Khan’s hunting retinue consisted of 20,000 dog handlers, 10,000
falconers, and numerous lions, leopards, and links to strike boars. When Kublai celebrated
the new year in his court, he prayed with 5,000 elephants all covered with beautiful clothes.
There, he received gifts of more than 100,000 white horses, very beautiful and fine. Well,
historians have universally considered such numbers as Marco usually gives as hyperbole
since a hunting party that large would be bigger than any army on earth at the time.
But in a way, we can’t really blame Marco for exaggerating because he saw sites that no one
from Europe had ever seen before. China did have material wealth, riches, and technology,
and printing presses and paper money and porcelains and paintings far beyond anything
that medieval Europe had at the time and favor with the Khan came with major benefits.
Marco received a piazza and inscribed gold tablet from Kublai Khan which designated him as
a guest of the great Khan and served as a sort of passport that enabled him to travel across
China and Southeast China. This tablet allowed him to move unbothered to areas such as
Burma, India, and Tibet and gave him all these avenues of exploration that filled up his
travels and make it such a fascinating account, but after decades of traveling through Asia,
the Polos requested to Kublai Khan permission to return to Venice. They had already
accumulated significant wealth and began to worry that if he died, then a successor might
be hostile to anyone who held close relations with his predecessor. They knew that time was
running short for a safe journey to return back to Italy and they had to embark on the long
journey while they still enjoyed the political patronage of a ruler who controlled much of the
lands between China and home.
Their chance came in 1292, when Kublai’s great nephew, Arghun, the Ilkhan of Persia sent
representatives to the court in China searching for a wife of his own kin. They selected
Kokochin, a maiden of 17, and asked the Polos to return with the wedding party to Persia.
The land route between China and Iran was engulfed in war so the party left port on a fleet
of 14 ships from the Southeastern Chinese city of Zaytun to reach Persia by the sea. After
two more arduous years, the Polos arrived in Venice in 1295 to find a wholly unfamiliar land
that appeared nearly as exotic as the one they had left. It had been some 20 years since
they had last set foot in the city and much had changed. All in all, they had traveled almost
15,000 miles on their journeys.
Marco while he was in prison later wrote an account of all of his travels and that’s why he is
so well remembered today. Even though he was not the only European to visit Asia during
the Middle Ages, he is clearly the most famous. He was among the first to visit China and a
pioneer who traveled farther along the Silk Road than any European before him. He was the
HFM 058 –
Explorers that Pushed the Boundaries of the
Known World, Part 1: Marco Polo – Opening
Europe’s Window to the East
confidant of the Great Kublai Khan and acted as an exotic envoy of both the Chinese and the
Italians of Venice foreshadowing the multi-culturalism of the modern world. What’s more he
accomplished this during the period of history when traveling the world was extremely
difficult both monetarily and logistically.
When Columbus was sailing the ocean in 1492, he had Marco Polo’s travels at his side so
Marco did a lot not only to serve as an inspiration of Medieval Europe but the age of
exploration to come in Europe two centuries later.
So like I said, this podcast episode is part one of five of travelers and explorers. I have a
book coming out in March called Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9
Other Travelers and Explorers that Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World. I go into a
lot more detail than I will be able to on these podcast episodes and I include a lot more
people that I also won’t be able to touch on, so I hope you can pick it up and enjoy when it
comes out.
For more history like this that is offbeat, obscure, but most of all not boring, come check out
my website at www.michaelrank.net. There, you can find podcasts and blog posts like this.
I’ll even throw in a free history Ebook that you can grab right now at
www.michaelrank.net\freebook. Have a good day!