Marco Polo - A native of Venice

A native of Venice, Marco Polo was the son of NICCOLÒ POLO, a minor nobleman and merchant in jewels. Just prior to Marco’s birth, his father and his uncle MAFFEO POLO had left for Constantinople (present-day Istanbul, Turkey), from where they subsequently embarked on a journey across Asia to Cathay and the court of Kublai Khan, the Great Khan, ruler of the Mongols, at Cambaluc (present-day Beijing, China). Marco’s mother had died in childbirth, and he was 15 before his father returned to Venice in 1269. In 1271, 17-year-old Polo accompanied his father and uncle on their second journey to the East. From Venice, they sailed to the east shore of the MEDITERRANEAN SEA, and at Acre, north of Jerusalem, they met with papal legate Teobaldo Visconti. He gave them a letter for Kublai Khan explaining that the delay in the election of a new pope had precluded the sending of 100 missionary priests, which the Mongol emperor had requested on the elder Polos’ earlier trip to China. Soon afterward, Visconti himself was elected to the papacy as Pope Gregory X, and the Polos, recalled to Acre upon hearing the news, were joined there by just two Dominican friars, William of Tripoli and Nicolas of Vicenza, who planned to carry Christian learning to Kublai Khan’s domain. Not long after they had left Acre, the two priests decided not to risk the hazards of a long journey to the East, and they turned back to the Mediterranean coast.

The Polos nevertheless continued eastward across Mesopotamia to Baghdad and into Persia (present-day Iran), then went southward to Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, carrying with them a flask of holy oil from the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem for Kublai Khan. Although the Polos had planned to continue their journey by sea, they were unable to find a boat at Hormuz on which they were willing to embark. Instead, they decided to undertake an overland journey, and, in 1272, they traversed the desert of Persia’s southern Kerman region, traveling northeastward into the mountains of Khorasan. From there, they entered northern Afghanistan, visiting the cities of Herat and Balkh, the easternmost point reached by ALEXANDER THE GREAT in his conquests 1,500 years earlier.

En route to the caravan trade center at Kashgar on the Chinese frontier,
the young Polo fell ill, and his father and uncle took him to the mountains of Badakhsan in northeastern Afghanistan, where they remained a year while he recovered his health. From the mountains of northern Afghanistan, the Polos continued their journey to Cathay by following the Oxus River (the Amu Darya) northward toward Samarkand and around the northern Hindu Kush mountain range to the 15,600-foot-high Pamir Plateau, where Marco noted the effects of the high altitude and also observed a peculiar type of large wild sheep. They then traveled along the edge of the Taklimakan desert to the remote western Chinese city of Lop Nor on the edge of the GOBI DESERT.

Polo and his father and uncle crossed the desert region of northwestern China with a camel caravan. In the middle of inner Mongolia, a 40-day journey from the court of Kublai Khan, they were met by representatives of the Mongol emperor, who escorted them to the royal palace, Shangdu, northwest of Cambaluc, which they reached in 1275, after a three-and-a-half-year journey from Europe. The Mongol emperor, much impressed by Polo, who by then was a young man of 21, appointed him to a diplomatic post. Over the next 17 years, the emperor sent Polo on missions throughout his vast empire. Adept at languages, Polo quickly mastered several Mongol dialects. His official travels took him all over China and Southeast Asia.

He visited Tibet and the provinces along the YANGTZE RIVER (Chang), YELLOW RIVER (Huang He), and upper Mekong River, and he was the first known European to visit the interior of Burma and what is now Thailand and Vietnam. At one point, he undertook a seaward expedition on behalf of Kublai Khan in which he sailed to the islands of Indonesia. In the north, he visited the former Mongol capital at Karakorum in what is now modern Mongolia, and he may have journeyed into eastern SIBERIA. For three years of his stay in China, 1282 to 1285, Polo served as governor of the city of Yangchow (Yangzhou).

While Marco had been in service to the emperor, his father and uncle had become wealthy from their trading activities. By 1292, however, all three were concerned about their future in China after the death of the emperor, who by that time was well advanced in years, and they were anxious to return to Italy. That year, they accepted an opportunity to return to the West as escorts for the Mongolian princess Cocachin, who had been betrothed to the khan of Persia, Arghun. Since warfare still raged along the overland route to Persia, it was decided to travel by sea. The Polos, provided with a 14-ship fleet, carrying combined crews of 600, sailed from the Chinese port of Zaiton (Quanzhou) and, after a long passage around Sumatra, entered the Indian Ocean by way of the Strait of Malacca. The voyage across the Indian Ocean included stops at the Nicobar and Andaman Islands, as well as a visit to CEYLON (present-day Sri Lanka).

In 1294, Polo, his father, his uncle, and the princess arrived safely in Hormuz after a two-year voyage. All but 18 of the 600 members of the expedition had perished, either in shipwrecks or from SCURVY. Since Arghun, the khan of Persia to whom Cocachin had been promised, had died a year before they arrived, she became the bride of his son and successor, Ghazan.

The Polos remained at the Persian court at Tabriz for some months, then continued their homeward trek to Trabzon on the Black Sea, from where they sailed to Constantinople (present-day Istanbul, Turkey). They then headed for Venice, arriving in late 1295, after an absence of 24 years. In 1298, Marco took part in a naval war between Genoa and his native Venice, serving as a commander of a Venetian galley. On September 6, 1298, he was captured along with 7,000 other Venetians following a naval engagement at Curzola on the Dalmatian coast of what is now Croatia. In the Genoese prison where he was confined, Polo met a writer of romances, Rustichello (or Rusticano) of Pisa, also a prisoner of war. Polo related his experiences in the Far East to him, and Rustichello recorded them in a work that came to be known as The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East (also known in various editions and languages as The Travels of Marco Polo, The Book of Marco Polo, The Book of Marvels, The Description of the World, and Il Milione, the last referring to Marco Polo himself, “the man with a million stories”). Released after a year, Polo returned to Venice, where he married and lived the life of a wealthy merchant, dying in 1324 at the age of 70.

During the next two centuries, Marco Polo’s book became the principal source of information about the Far East for medieval Europeans. Many of the places and customs he described were unknown in Europe, where contact with the Orient had been severed by the Muslim conquests five centuries earlier. His depictions of the great cities of China, with populations far exceeding any in Europe, as well as his account of the huge palaces of the Mongols and other wonders of the East, were met with skepticism. For his repeated use of the term millions in his expansive descriptions of the Orient, he later became known as “Marco Millions.” He was the first European to mention the use of paper, the Chinese method of printing from blocks of carved type, how coal was used as a fuel, and the Chinese practice of using paper money, all of which were unknown in Europe until that time. Many of his observations were rejected by his contemporaries as outlandish exaggerations, although his geographic descriptions of Asia were more readily accepted and were incorporated by ABRAHAM CRESQUES in his Catalan Atlas of 1375.

In the late 1400s, CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, influenced by Polo’s writings, grossly underestimated the distance between the west coast of Europe and the easternmost point of Asia, and, based on this determination, undertook his historic voyage in 1492. When he arrived in the WEST INDIES that year, he believed he had reached CIPANGU, as described by Marco Polo (probably referring to Japan or some other outlying islands of Asia). Parts of Burma, Southeast Asia, and western China that Marco Polo visited during his long sojourn in the Far East were not seen again by Europeans until the 19th century. The type of longhorned sheep he described in the Pamir region was later named Ovis polis, in his honor, by British zoologist Edward Blyth in 1840.