Marco Polo

Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant and traveller whose account of Asia became one of medieval Europe’s most influential descriptions of the wider world. Born in 1254, he left Venice as a teenager with his father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo, experienced merchants who had already travelled deep into Eurasia. The family journeyed through territories of the Mongol Empire and eventually reached the court of Kublai Khan. Marco later claimed to have spent many years travelling and serving in various capacities within the khan’s dominions.

After returning to Venice in the 1290s, Marco was captured during war with Genoa and dictated an account of his travels to the writer Rustichello of Pisa. The resulting work, usually known as The Travels of Marco Polo, mixes close observation with material derived from informants and literary shaping, making individual claims difficult to assess. It nevertheless supplied European readers with unusually detailed information about Yuan China, Central Asia, trade routes and the Indian Ocean world. Its circulation influenced later geographical imagination, including the ambitions of Christopher Columbus.

In William Dalrymple’s In Xanadu, in 1986 William Dalrymple set out to retrace Marco Polo’s route from Jerusalem to the summer capital of Kublai Khan at Xanadu. John Man’s Kublai Khan also examines Kublai’s patronage, taxation, communications and religious policies, together with the failed invasions of Japan and campaigns in Southeast Asia. Marco Polo’s famous account provides one perspective on the court, but Man tests it against Chinese and Mongol evidence and the surviving landscapes of Kublai’s world, presenting a ruler who was both heir to a nomadic empire and architect of a new Chinese dynasty. Further fictional perspectives on Marco Polo can be found in Gary Jennings’ The Journeyer and Paul Doherty’s The Plague Lord. For broader historical treatment of Marco Polo, see Giles Milton’s The Riddle and the Knight and John Man’s Xanadu.