A Family Business That Reached Beijing
Marco Polo was born in Venice in 1254 into a merchant family already engaged in the eastern trade. His father Niccolo and uncle Maffeo had travelled to the court of Kublai Khan before he was old enough to know them, returning with a request from the Great Khan for holy oil from Jerusalem and for scholars from the pope. In 1271 the brothers set out again, taking the seventeen-year-old Marco with them, and were away for twenty-four years.
The route went through Anatolia, Persia, and the Pamirs, along the desert edges of the Silk Roads to Shangdu and the Yuan capital at what is now Beijing. The Mongol empire's control of Eurasia made such a journey possible for the first and briefly the only time. Marco says he served Kublai for years as an envoy travelling on imperial business through the southern provinces, Burma, and beyond, and that the khan valued reports of local customs more than dry administrative accounts.
The Book of a Prisoner
They came home in 1295, and within a few years Marco was captured in the war between Venice and Genoa and held in a Genoese prison. There he met Rustichello of Pisa, a professional writer of Arthurian romances, and dictated to him a description of the world. The collaboration explains a great deal about the resulting text: the stock phrases, the appeals to lords and knights, the occasional flourishes that belong to romance rather than reportage, and the sheer readability that made it a medieval bestseller.
No original survives. Roughly one hundred and fifty manuscripts exist in half a dozen languages, and they differ so much that scholars work from composite reconstructions. Nothing in it is quite fixed. Later Italians nicknamed the book Il Milione, either for the family's nickname or as a joke about the millions the author counted, and even in his lifetime he was widely regarded as a spinner of tall tales, though a Dominican friar prepared a Latin version that gave it scholarly standing.
Did He Go?
The doubts are old and were sharpened in 1995 when Frances Wood argued he may never have reached China, pointing to his silence on tea, foot binding, chopsticks, Chinese writing, and the walls, and to his absence from Chinese records. Defenders reply that the omissions fit a Persian-speaking servant of a Mongol regime that stood apart from Chinese society, and that specialists have matched his descriptions of paper currency, salt administration, and provincial revenue to Yuan sources with a precision hearsay could not supply.
The consensus now leans toward accepting the journey while treating parts of the book as compiled, exaggerated, or supplied by Rustichello. He died in Venice in 1324, a moderately prosperous merchant, and a much-repeated deathbed remark has him insisting he had not told half of what he saw. Whatever its truth, the book did its work: Columbus owned a heavily annotated copy, and generations of Europeans learned from it that the world was larger, richer, and stranger than they had assumed.
