A Venetian prisoner’s dictation mapped Mongol Asia for Europe
Marco Polo (c.1254–8 January 1324) travelled the Silk Road from 1271 to 1295 and, as a Genoese prisoner, dictated The Travels of Marco Polo around 1300. Not the first European in China, he was the first to leave a detailed Western chronicle of its porcelain, gunpowder and paper money.
Neither his exact birth date nor birthplace survives in the archives; most scholars accept Venice around 1254 and reject rival claims for Korčula or Constantinople. His father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo were rich Near East traders who had left before he was born. His mother died, an aunt and uncle raised him, and he learned merchant skills such as handling foreign coin. He met his father for the first time at fifteen, when the brothers came home in 1269 from the court of Kublai Khan.
In 1271, aged seventeen, Marco set out with them. At Acre they talked with the archdeacon Tedaldo Visconti; when a conclave that had dragged on for 33 months elected that same man pope, the Polos hurried back for his letters to the Khan. They reached Kublai’s palace at Shangdu when Marco was about 21. Impressed by the young man, the Khan sent him on missions to India and Myanmar and repeatedly refused to let the family leave.
Around 1291 Kublai finally released them to escort the princess Kököchin to her intended husband, Arghun Khan, in Persia. The Polos reached Venice in 1295 after 24 years and some 24,000 kilometres, their fortune turned into gemstones. Venice was fighting Genoa, and Marco fitted out a galley armed with a trebuchet; he was probably captured in 1296 off the Anatolian coast.
In prison he dictated his story to a fellow captive, Rustichello da Pisa, who mixed in tales of his own. Released in August 1299, he joined his family in a large palazzo they had bought at San Giovanni Crisostomo. His nickname, Milione, may have meant ‘million’ or may simply have shortened Emilione to tell his family branch apart. The Padua scholar Pietro d’Abano recorded Marco describing a sack-shaped star seen in southern skies.
Source: Marco Polo
