Marco Polo

Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant and traveller whose account described journeys through Asia and service at the court of Kublai Khan. Dictated after his return to Europe, the Travels combined personal observation, commercial information and material gathered from others, becoming one of medieval Europe’s most influential descriptions of the wider world.

In Gary Jennings’s The Journeyer, Marco Polo narrates an expansive and frequently unreliable version of the life that later produced his famous travel account. In Paul Doherty’s The Plague Lord, Kublai turns to his Venetian adviser Marco Polo to investigate.

In non-fiction, Marco Polo is discussed in Giles Milton’s The Riddle and the Knight, William Dalrymple’s In Xanadu, and John Man’s Xanadu. In Giles Milton’s The Riddle and the Knight, Milton compares its accounts with earlier sources and with the better documented travels of figures such as Marco Polo.