Marco Polo (1254 - 1324) was a Venetian merchant, traveller and writer who journeyed across Asia along the Silk Road and spent years in the service of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. The account he dictated after his return, known as The Travels of Marco Polo, became the most influential European description of Asia before the age of ocean exploration. [1][2]
Background
Marco Polo was born in 1254 into a merchant family of the Republic of Venice, then among the leading trading powers of the Mediterranean. His father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo were already engaged in long-distance commerce and had travelled east, reaching the Mongol court, before Marco joined them. [1]
Journey to Asia
Around 1271 the three Polos set out from Venice on an overland route through Anatolia, Persia and Central Asia, crossing the Pamirs and the deserts of Central Asia before reaching the territories of the Mongol Empire. The journey took several years. [2]
They were received by Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan and founder of the Yuan dynasty in China. Marco's account states that he entered the Khan's service and was sent on missions to distant parts of the empire, an arrangement that lasted some seventeen years and gave him knowledge of regions including Yunnan, Burma and the cities of eastern China. [1]
Return and imprisonment
The Polos left China around 1291, travelling by sea by way of Sumatra, India and Persia, reportedly as escorts for a Mongol princess sent to marry a ruler of the Ilkhanate, and reached Venice in about 1295. [2]
Marco was later captured during a conflict between Venice and Genoa and held prisoner in Genoa, where he dictated his account to a fellow prisoner, the romance writer Rustichello da Pisa. The resulting book circulated widely in manuscript under titles including Il Milione and Le Divisament dou Monde. [3]
The Travels
The work describes cities, trade goods, customs, currencies and administration across Asia, including paper money, the imperial postal relay system and the coal burned as fuel in northern China. Its scale and the wealth it reported were received with scepticism by many contemporaries, and modern scholars continue to debate how much Polo saw himself and how much came from other travellers and from Rustichello's shaping of the text. [3]
Later life and legacy
Polo returned to Venice, married and worked as a merchant, and died in the city on 8 January 1324. [1]
His account influenced European cartography and the ambitions of later navigators; Christopher Columbus is known to have owned and annotated a copy. The place names and descriptions in the book, including the province he called Cathay, entered European geographical vocabulary and remained in use long after his death. [2]
