Marco Polo was born in Venice around 1254, though the precise date and location of his birth remain matters of scholarly debate, with some theories pointing to the island of Korčula or even Constantinople as alternatives that have never gained wide acceptance. His father, Niccolò Polo, was a merchant trader of the Adriatic city-state who, along with his brother Maffeo, had embarked on an extraordinary commercial journey eastward sometime in the 1260s. The two brothers traveled through Central Asia, eventually reaching the court of Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler who presided over the largest contiguous land empire in history. When Niccolò finally returned to Venice around 1269, he discovered that the wife he had left pregnant had died and that he had a fifteen-year-old son he had never met.
The reunion was brief. Niccolò and Maffeo had returned bearing a commission from Kublai Khan himself, who had requested that the Pope send one hundred learned men capable of debating the superiority of Christianity over other religions, as well as holy oil from the lamp at Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The papal response was thin, dispatching only two Dominican friars who turned back almost immediately upon encountering the difficulties of the road. The Polos pressed on regardless, taking the young Marco with them when they departed Venice again in 1271. Marco was approximately seventeen years old, and the journey that lay before the three of them would last twenty-four years.
The route the Polos followed wound through the eastern Mediterranean, across the highlands of Persia, through the formidable terrain of the Pamirs, and along the ancient Silk Road into the interior of Asia. They passed through present-day Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and across the deserts of Central Asia, observing cultures, trade goods, and natural phenomena that no Western traveler had recorded in systematic detail. Marco was a keen observer with a particular eye for commerce, local customs, military organization, and geography. He noted the petroleum seeps of Baku, the ruby mines of Badakhshan, and the nomadic practices of the peoples of the steppe with the analytical precision of a born merchant.
The Polos arrived at the court of Kublai Khan at Shangdu, or Xanadu as it became known in the Western imagination, sometime around 1274 or 1275. Kublai received them warmly and was particularly taken with the young Marco, whose intelligence and receptiveness impressed the emperor. Marco was appointed to serve as a foreign emissary and envoy, a role that sent him traveling across the vast territories under Mongol rule. Over the following seventeen years, he visited present-day Myanmar, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam as part of diplomatic missions, and he traversed the length and breadth of China, observing its extraordinary administrative sophistication, its massive cities, its paper currency, its coal burning for heat, and its postal relay system that could transmit messages across thousands of miles with remarkable speed.
Marco's account of China under the Yuan dynasty presented Europeans with a civilization of a scale and complexity that strained their credulity. He described the city of Quinsai, roughly corresponding to modern Hangzhou, as having a circumference of one hundred miles and containing twelve thousand stone bridges. He wrote of Kublai Khan's palace at Cambulac, roughly corresponding to Beijing, with walls of gold and silver, of hunting parks stocked with animals, of a court of extraordinary luxury and ritual. He noted the existence of paper money and recorded his astonishment that such notes were accepted throughout the empire as payment. He described the burning of a black stone, coal, for heat and cooking, something wholly unfamiliar to his European readers. He provided the first Western descriptions of porcelain and gunpowder as well.
The Polos found their return journey home complicated by Kublai Khan's evident reluctance to let them go. An opportunity finally arose around 1291 when the emperor required an escort of trusted foreigners to accompany the Mongol princess Kököchin on her journey by sea to Persia, where she was to be married to the local Mongol ruler. The Polos were chosen for the task, and the fleet departed China by sea, rounding Southeast Asia and crossing the Indian Ocean. The voyage was arduous; many members of the expedition died of disease or shipwreck along the way, though the Polos and the princess survived. They arrived in Persia around 1293 and delivered Kököchin to her destination, then traveled overland through Persia, Anatolia, and the Black Sea region to Constantinople, before finally arriving back in Venice in 1295, twenty-four years after their departure.
Their return was met, according to later legend, with initial disbelief from neighbors who barely recognized them and doubted the fantastic accounts they brought back. Venice was then at war with Genoa, its great commercial rival, and Marco joined the war effort. He was captured by the Genoese, possibly at the naval Battle of Curzola in 1298, and imprisoned in Genoa. There he encountered a fellow prisoner named Rustichello da Pisa, a writer of romances who recognized the commercial potential of Marco's stories. Marco dictated his experiences to Rustichello, who shaped them into the book that would become known in various languages as The Travels of Marco Polo, Il Milione, or The Book of the Marvels of the World, composed around 1300.
Marco was released in 1299 and returned to Venice, where he became a wealthy merchant, married a woman named Donata Badoer, and had three daughters. He lived comfortably until his death on January 8, 1324, and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Venice. During his lifetime he had been nicknamed Milione, a term that according to the fifteenth-century humanist Giovanni Battista Ramusio derived from his habit of describing Kublai Khan's wealth as counting in the millions, though some scholars suggest the nickname was associated with his father Niccolò as well.
The influence of Marco Polo's account proved incalculable. Christopher Columbus owned an annotated copy of the book and was profoundly inspired by it, particularly by Marco's descriptions of the island of Cipangu, which Columbus identified with Japan and which partly motivated his westward voyages. Marco Polo's geographic observations influenced European cartography for generations, contributing to the Catalan Atlas of 1375 and the Fra Mauro map of 1450, two of the most significant world maps of the medieval period. Though other European travelers had reached China before him, none had left behind a chronicle of comparable breadth, detail, and systematic observation, and it was Marco Polo's account that gave the Western world its first coherent image of East Asia, an image both remarkably accurate in many particulars and charged with wonder that ensured the book's enduring readership across seven centuries.
