EPILOGUE
DESPITE THE ESSENTIAL ACCURACY of the Travels, the name Il Milione clung to Marco Polo after his death. He was seen, initially, more as an entertainer and fabricator than as a historian. For instance, Amalio Bonaguisi, a Florentine translator of Marco’s account, wrote in 1392 that the Venetian had undertaken his labors purely “to pass the time and [avoid] melancholy.” He warned those who read his version of the Travels, “the contents appear to me to be incredible things and his statements appear to me to be not lies but more likely miracles.”
Bonaguisi’s reaction was understandable. Marco’s collaborator, Rustichello, freely interpolated several Christian miracles in the belief that the story needed more excitement than it already had; in the process, the outright literary fabrications, though few in number, cast doubt on Marco’s actual experiences. “It may well be true that about which he tells,” Bonaguisi concluded, “but I do not believe it, though nonetheless there are found throughout the world many different things in one country and another…. I copied it for my pleasure…, not to be believed or credited.”
This state of affairs was not as unlikely as it sounds because the only other account even roughly comparable to Marco Polo’s was a collection of tall tales and beguiling myths passed off as fact. Sir John Mandeville, whose Travels first appeared in a French edition in 1356, might be called the English Marco Polo, except that Sir John in all likelihood never traveled farther than a well-stocked nobleman’s library. Identified only as an English knight from Hertfordshire, the mysterious Mandeville said that he left home in 1322—or, in some versions, 1332—and traveled to the Holy Land, and later on to India, Persia, and even China, and returned home in 1356 (or 1366). He claimed to have shown his report to the pope, who proclaimed it true. But the account was actually an artful compilation of stories gleaned from historians and others—including Pliny, Herodotus, and the mythical Prester John, to whom Marco was also susceptible—as well as from various Alexander romances, legends about Alexander the Great. He also incorporated works of lesser-known writers such as Albert of Aix, William of Tripoli, Odoric of Pordenone, and Vincent of Beauvais, who in turn had borrowed heavily from authors of antiquity. Fittingly, Mandeville’s opus was later pillaged by others bent on compiling their own fabulous histories.
Mandeville’s imaginary Travels became a popular work in late medieval and Renaissance England. In the fifteenth century, more than five times as many editions of Mandeville’s book were published as of Polo’s. For at least two centuries, the two books were often bracketed together as fanciful, entertaining accounts of voyages that might have been. By the early eighteenth century, Mandeville’s work underwent a reevaluation and was finally debunked as “enchanted ground and Fairyland.”
Unlike Mandeville, who set out to fabricate, Marco believed every word he dictated; however, his notion of the truth was not merely literal but incorporated subjective, imaginative, and even mythological elements in an attempt to fashion a larger, more persuasive reality. Had Marco relied on facts alone, his account would have been as dry as those left by his clerical predecessors. Although it contained puffery, it was not a fabrication, and he expected—in fact, demanded—that his audience believe every word. While this approach may appear to have placed a huge burden on him, since he was obliged to attest to the veracity of all he described, the burden was transferred to his readers, whom he repeatedly challenged to accept whatever he had to say.
Two decades of travel had taught Marco that fact was stranger than fiction, but he strained to persuade others of that paradox. Did any writer equipped with Marco’s experience ever feel the need to boast as much as he did, or to plead with his audience to accept what he was saying as the truth? Yet he possessed a unique asset to convince the doubters: personal reflections as well as historical commentary about the most powerful ruler in the world, Kublai Khan. Without his portrayal of this larger-than-life figure, Marco’s account would have been just another colorful report of life on the Silk Road. His long service to the Mongol leader lifted his book onto another plane entirely; more than being a mere traveler, he led a charmed existence at the juncture of two civilizations, acting as an intermediary and, best of all, living to tell the tale.
Yet Marco has his blind spots. Once Kublai Khan enters his decline, the Venetian lacks a vocabulary to describe the deterioration of his former hero. Elsewhere, he is prone to sudden enthusiasms—for women, or art, or even religions—which he discards as quickly as he takes them up, as if he were a merchant in a bazaar, handling, considering, and finally rejecting the merchandise placed before him. His grasp of history is unreliable, in spite of his efforts to appear learned. He knows a little bit about many things, but he remains a dazzling dilettante.
THREE CENTURIES after Marco’s death, Francesco Sansovino’s guidebook to Venice, considering the Church of San Lorenzo, mentioned the Venetian traveler in conjunction with Columbus, the Genoese navigator and explorer: “Under the portico is buried Marco Polo, surnamed Milione, who wrote the travels of the new world, and who was the first before Christopher Columbus who discovered new countries.” Had Marco been alive to receive these accolades, he would have accepted them readily, although he might have pointed out that he did not think of himself as an explorer of unknown lands but as an exceptionally well-traveled merchant following traditional routes, making observations of ancient worlds in Asia and in India. The lands and peoples he investigated were new only to Europe.
It appears that by 1685 Marco’s reputation in Venice was secure at last. In his encyclopedic ecclesiastical history, Tomaso Fugazzoni, describing repairs to the Church of San Lorenzo, remarked, “In the center of the portico was the burial place of the most famous Marco Polo, noble Venetian”—a description grand enough to satisfy even its subject’s vanity.
But the site did not survive. By 1827, Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna, writing in his comprehensive catalog of Venetian inscriptions, mentioned the lost memorials of the Polo family. In fact, the entire church of San Lorenzo had fallen into decrepitude. It was later rebuilt, and more recent investigations suggest that the bones of the Polos and others buried within its walls were collected in a common grave, and perhaps later used as filling to support the new floor of the remodeled church. In any event, the sarcophagus and other items marking the final resting place of Marco, his parents and uncle, and his wife and children were all lost.
If any surviving member of the Polo family could be said to have carried on the family legacy, it was Fantina, the oldest of the three daughters, and she did so not as an explorer but as a persistent litigant. Records show that she was in and out of court defending the inheritance she received from her father; on August 4, 1362, she claimed that her late husband had fraudulently appropriated her legacy before he died in the Venetian colony of Crete. For decades thereafter, Polos squabbled among themselves as they competed for the assets of the family—its gold, spices, fabrics, and real estate. None of them appears to have taken an interest in or furthered the cause of Marco’s greatest asset, the chronicle of his travels. That mission was left to others, as manuscripts proliferated across Europe, and the Travels took on a life of its own, far removed from the provincial circles of Venice.
MARCO POLO’S collaboration with Rustichello of Pisa gave rise to a cottage industry of reproduction, all of it spontaneous and independent. The earliest patrons and readers of the Travels were scholars, monks, and interested noblemen. Less-educated and less-privileged people in Venice and elsewhere, if they knew of the book at all, relied on hearsay concerning Marco Polo’s fantastic account.
One hundred and nineteen early manuscript versions of Marco’s book survive. All are different. An early version, in the Tuscan dialect, may have been composed while Marco was alive. The Travels soon appeared in other European tongues, including Venetian, German, English, Catalan, Aragonese, Gaelic, and of course Latin. In an era before movable type, the Travels received wide distribution, but others outdid it for popularity. At least 275 manuscripts of John Mandeville’s fictional account circulated, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, no fewer than 500 manuscripts of the Divine Comedy placed Dante’s vision before the reading public.
In contrast, Venetian skepticism rendered Marco a prophet without honor in his own land. Dante, his contemporary, never mentioned him (although some scholars believe they have discerned a cryptic reference to the traveler). Of all the early manuscripts, just two circulated in Marco’s native city, and they were dated 1445 and 1446, nearly 150 years after Marco served time in Genoa with Rustichello. A fortunate few may have been able to consult a public copy of the book—version unknown—said to be chained to the Rialto Bridge, in the heart of Venice’s commercial district. Jostled by bickering merchants and tradesmen, dedicated readers would have gathered to be transported to another world, one inhabited by Kublai Khan, his alluring concubines, and his limitless armies—the fruit of Marco Polo’s travels no less than of his imagination.
Marco’s sensational manuscript eventually became general knowledge. Ramusio’s claim that “all Italy in [a] few months was full of it” was something of a well-intended exaggeration. In reality, the work was disseminated slowly, one handwritten copy at a time, and required more than a century to win a permanent place in the European historical and literary consciousness. Marco Polo eventually attained the status of a culture carrier, one of the rare individuals of wide experience who embody and transmit an entire ethos to succeeding generations. The culture was that of the global traveler and trader, comprising numerous subcultures—those of the Mongols, the Chinese, the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent, and Asian tribes. His reach extended from Armenia to Zanzibar. His portrayals of these cultures, and especially of China, became Europe’s primary source of information about them until the nineteenth century. Marco provided Europe with a description not of the world, as his original title promised, but of its missing half. In the process, he rescued crucial people and events from utter obscurity.
EDITORS AND SCHOLARS attempted to reconcile the disorderly manuscripts, to verify or express skepticism about various details, and to guide readers through the distant and occasionally unfathomable Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Among the most prominent was a monk who was none too happy about the task of translating the immense manuscript into Latin. “I, Brother Francesco Pipino of Bologna of the Order of the Brothers Preachers,” he began, “am forced by many of my fathers and masters to reduce the true and faithful translation from the common tongue”—probably Tuscan or a Venetian dialect—“to Latin.” He completed his work between 1310 and 1314, during the last years of Marco’s life. The manuscript that Pipino used was close to the original, but it seems that Marco kept adding to his account until his death. For this reason, Pipino feared that his scholarly translation might not be the last word, and furthermore, it would lack the raw excitement of the “common tongue.”
Whatever his misgivings, Pipino brought distinct religious ideas to bear on his labors. The Latin translation was intended to brief the monks of his religious order about the East in preparation for establishing distant missions. He edited with an eye toward propriety and religious doctrine, and omitted sexually explicit references as well as many of Marco’s sly double entendres. When he felt it necessary, Pipino interpolated words of his own. He expressed the hope that his pious readers “seeing the gentile peoples wrapped in such darkness and blindness and in such uncleanness may give thanks to God who lighting his faithful with the light of truth has deigned to call them from so dangerous darkness into his wonderful light.”
Marco’s spiritual perceptions throughout his account are, of course, far more nuanced and paradoxical than Fra Pipino’s. Although Marco, for example, never gained an appreciation of the subtlety, power, and sophistication of Islamic culture, Pipino outdid him by inserting the world “hated” or similar adjectives each time the Venetian referred to Muslims or infidels; the result exaggerated Marco’s indifference toward Islam to the point of outright hostility—but the rancor existed in Pipino’s mind, not Marco’s. Nevertheless, Pipino’s distortions survive even in some modern versions of the Travels.
THE FIRST PRINTED VERSION of the Travels appeared in Nuremburg in 1477, about 175 years after Rustichello set the account down in manuscript form. The book featured a full-page idealized representation of the young traveler on the frontispiece. Demand for Marco’s work led to a second German printed version, this one produced in Augsburg, four years later. Printers in other countries followed suit. Pipino’s rendition of Marco’s account served as the basis of a popular French translation (not to be confused with the French dialect in which Rustichello likely wrote), issued in book form in 1556.
For many years, the leading Italian version was Ramusio’s. It was published in several editions, with the definitive impression appearing in 1557, two years after Ramusio’s death in Padua (and more than two centuries after Marco’s death). The endlessly enthusiastic Ramusio, who was privy to the gossip surrounding Marco, breathed new life into the Venetian traveler’s legend and fully realized his contribution to understanding the world in which they lived. “Seeing that so many details of that part of the world of which…Marco has written are being discovered in our time,” Ramusio wrote, “I have judged it a reasonable thing to make his book come to light with the help of different copies written more than two hundred years ago (in my judgment) perfectly correct and by a great length much more faithful than that which is read hitherto; so that the world should not lose that fruit which can be gathered from so great diligence and industry about so honorable a science.”
Of all the explorers, ancient and modern, Marco Polo impressed Ramusio as the greatest—greater, even, than Columbus. Ramusio admitted his judgment was biased, for Columbus hailed from Venice’s archrival, Genoa, and sailed under the flag of rival Spain. Still, he opined, “it seems like to me that a [voyage] by land should take precedence over one by sea,” considering the “enormous greatness of soul with which so difficult an enterprise was carried out and brought to conclusion along such an extraordinarily long and harsh route,” not to mention the “lack of food—not for days, but for months.”
Columbus carefully annotated a copy of Marco’s account during the four voyages he made to the New World, as the Genoese navigator tried in vain to find Marco Polo’s China. (It could be said that Marco misled rather than inspired Columbus into thinking that China lay in proximity to the Caribbean.) In his personal copy of the Italian translation of the Travels, Columbus made copious marginal notes indicating that he paid particular attention to potential cash crops that Marco mentioned—pepper, cinnamon, and cloves—all of which Columbus dreamed of importing to Europe at great profit. And, hoping to take up where the Polo company left off, he planned to meet the “Grand Khan” and present him with official letters from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, his royal sponsors, and instruct him in the ways of the West, especially Christianity—all without realizing that the Mongol Empire was a thing of the past.
The Travels inspired another impressionable voyager, a young diplomat named Antonio Pigafetta, who served as the official chronicler of Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, beginning in 1519. One of only eighteen survivors of that disastrous expedition, Pigafetta wrote his account of the circumnavigation in emulation of his hero and fellow Venetian, Marco Polo.
INCOMPLETE AND INCONSISTENT, the Travels remained an unfinished masterpiece that spoke to succeeding generations of voyagers and visionaries alike.
On a summer’s day in 1797, relates Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire.” Coleridge was twenty-five years old, the youngest of fourteen children of a country vicar. He had recently left Jesus College, Cambridge, without a degree, and set his heart on becoming a poet and utopian radical. Plagued by an unstable constitution and extreme melancholy, he sought relief in laudanum, a tincture of opium.
“In consequence of a slight indisposition,” he continues, “an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence…in ‘Purchas His Pilgrimage’”—the chronicle published in 1613 by Samuel Purchas, which incorporated broad swaths of Marco’s book. “In Xanadu did Cublai Can build a stately palace,” wrote Purchas, never imagining he would inspire some of the most famous words in English poetry, words that would be attributed to someone else, “encompassing sixteen miles of plain grounde with a wall, wherein are fertile Meadows, pleasant Springs, delightful Streames, and all sort of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be removed from place to place…Here the Kubla Khan commanded a palace to be built, and stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed within a wall.”
After reading those words, Coleridge passed three hours “in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses.” It seemed to him that while he drowsed, his unconscious mind composed “two to three hundred lines” of verse “without any sensation or consciousness of effort.” When he roused himself from his drug-induced stupor, he “instantly and eagerly” tried to set down as many of these dream verses as he could remember. The phantom verses presumably concerned Kublai Khan, given the material that Coleridge had been reading when he nodded off.
Just then, the infamous “person on business from Porlock” arrived to distract the young poet from his labors. Afterward, the poet, “on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!”
After struggling with his half-forgotten material, stolen as if from a dream, Coleridge commenced writing the first lines of “Kubla Khan”:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
The euphoric mood builds until Coleridge concludes with a warning about the dangers of unrestrained rapture. He imagines others observing him, or a kindred spirit, and crying out:
Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Coleridge’s harmonious vision of power and space extended so far ahead of its time that almost twenty years passed before he felt ready to publish his poem about “Kubla Khan,” the work that gave the Mongol leader a permanent place in the Western imagination.
Despite the difference in temperament between Marco, the peripatetic merchant, and Coleridge, the neurasthenic poet, the grandeur of the Mongol Empire spoke to them both. Coleridge was no stranger to hallucinations; they served as the source of his poetic visions. Without realizing the true source of his inspiration, he fell under the spell of the Venetian’s hypnotic descriptions, as paraphrased by Samuel Purchas. Marco, for his part, may have become familiar with opium while in Afghanistan, and the drug might have been connected with his illness there. Perhaps both men employed drugs, which would have heightened their perceptions and imparted unnatural vividness to their literary works. As Marco learned to tolerate opium, it may well have altered and sharpened his perceptions—and the Travels. In this case, it would be more accurate to say that he was an amplifier rather than exaggerator, that he was unnaturally prone to suggestion. That would explain why extensive parts of his account display a high degree of acuity and detail, while other parts are so fanciful. If Marco stopped using drugs such as opium when he returned to Venice, his withdrawal could have contributed to his transformation from the exuberant emissary who traveled from one kingdom to another to the vindictive merchant who pursued one lawsuit after another.
ALTHOUGH MARCO POLO was nearly forgotten, his book—considered an unclassifiable amalgam of fact and fiction, a gazetteer gone wild—lived on. That state of affairs began to change in the nineteenth century, when researchers tried to bring order to the chaotic state of Polo scholarship and to produce an authoritative version of his account. Drawn to Marco’s book as an expression of orientalisme, the vogue for Asian art and thought, the French were in the vanguard. In 1824, the Société de Géographie, based in Paris, issued a carefully annotated edition of the Travels. No longer did scholarship dwell on what was false; it was now concerned with documenting how much of Marco’s account was true. Despite his rhetorical excess, most of what he described withstood scrutiny. TheTravels came to be seen as a storehouse of generally reliable information about an inaccessible continent, and it attracted cadres of new admirers. What once sounded like fantasy came to be seen increasingly as history.
Four decades later, M. G. Pauthier, a French linguist, compared Polo’s account, as expressed in the 1824 edition, against Mongol and Chinese annals and realized that it was not some fable, drug-induced or otherwise, but a strikingly accurate report. The annals confirmed that Marco diligently recorded commercial activity, court rituals, and exotic religious and burial and marital customs.
Pauthier’s scholarly labors were enhanced and embellished by two subsequent commentators, Henry Yule and Henri Cordier, who burnished Marco’s reputation for English-speaking audiences everywhere. For these two scholars, the chief “fascination” of Polo’s account resided not in its content, or the unique way it came into being, but in its “difficult questions.” In ringing tones, Yule and Cordier declared, “It is a great book of puzzles, whilst our confidence in the man’s veracity is such that we feel certain every puzzle has a solution.” With the vigor and certainty of the era to which they belonged, they proposed to find the answers. Drawing on a global network of correspondents, they tirelessly pinned down Marco’s references to people and places across Asia, and demonstrated that he could have written his account only from direct observation. Yule and Cordier considered this evidence sufficient vindication for their peripatetic hero, but their prodigious fact-checking partly obscured Marco’s imaginative essence. If he had simply written an encyclopedia of Asia, it is unlikely that his work would have been as popular and influential as it became.
Yule and Cordier’s heavily annotated edition, four times longer than Marco’s original, portrayed him as a harbinger of the Age of Discovery and the most ambitious and accomplished of all explorers—more successful even than Ferdinand Magellan and Christopher Columbus, who were inspired in part by Marco’s travels. Unlike them, Marco did not wield a sword; he launched no wars, took no slaves, killed no enemies. Alone among the journeys of European explorers, his served as the basis for works of literature whose impact continues to be felt. “He was the first traveller to trace a route across the whole longitude of Asia,” Yule and Cordier observed with a flourish,
naming and describing kingdom and after kingdom which he had seen with his own eyes: the Deserts of Persia, the flowering plateaux and wild gorges of Badakhshan, the jade-bearing rivers of Khotan, the Mongolian Steppes, cradle of the power which had so lately threatened to swallow up Christendom, the new and brilliant court that had been established at Cambulac. The first traveller to reveal China in all its wealth and vastness, its mighty rivers, its huge cities, its rich manufactures, its swarming population; the inconceivably vast fleets that quickened its seas and its inland waters; to tell us of the nations on its borders, with all their eccentricities of manners and worship; of Tibet with its sordid devotees; of Burma with its golden pagodas and their tinkling crowns….
Even with its excessive eloquence, this was an accurate assessment of Marco’s accomplishment. Like Alexis de Tocqueville, Marco Polo was one of those rare strangers who saw a land for what it was more clearly than those who lived there.
ITALIAN SCHOLARSHIP concerning the Travels reached its zenith with the appearance of an ambitious edition compiled by Luigi Foscolo Benedetto. Published in Florence in 1928, this work attempted to collate all the various manuscript versions. Benedetto appeared to have the last word in Marco Polo studies, but in 1932, a remarkable manuscript surfaced, containing both more detailed episodes and new material. Sir Percival David, who was responsible for the discovery, was a collector and scholar based in London, and an expert in Chinese ceramics. His interest in Marco Polo’s travels in China led him to Toledo, Spain, and the library of Cardinal Francisco Xavier de Zelada (1717–1801), whose holdings included a Latin translation of Marco Polo’s manuscript, 50 percent longer than other versions. Scholars concluded that it was written, or translated, in Italy sometime during the fifteenth century, at a time when other Marco Polo accounts were making the transition from handwritten manuscripts to printed books. It became known as the Zelada text, or sometimes the Toledo manuscript.
To bring the most complete version of Polo’s book to a wider audience, two scholars, Professor A. C. Moule, of Cambridge, and Paul Pelliot, based in France, compiled an ambitious “composite translation” that would “attempt to weave together all, or nearly all, the extant words which have ever claimed to be Marco Polo’s and to indicate the source from which each word comes.” The result, incorporating the Zelada text, was published, in English and in French, in 1938, and two volumes of notes followed. The result was not just the most complete manuscript, it was also the freshest, for Moule and Pelliot’s rendering captured some of the fire and spontaneity of Marco’s original voice. Mixing colloquial speech and scholarship, it evoked Marco’s volatile spirit with more clarity than its reserved and stately predecessors.
MARCO POLO was not merely a traveler; he was a participant in the history of his times. He had grown from a naïve seventeen-year-old in the shadow of his father and uncle into a skillful and assured minister of the most powerful ruler in the world. His book is an account of, among other things, history that he witnessed, and, to a limited extent, helped to fashion. Perhaps no single individual would have been able to fulfill all the literary and historical tasks that he set for himself; the range of knowledge and the distances he covered were just too immense for one gentleman of the late thirteenth century and early fourteenth to discuss with complete accuracy. But in his ambitious attempt, he extended the bounds of human knowledge and experience and imagination.
The ultimate meaning of the Travels continues to elude, tantalize, and exasperate those who read it closely. Does it offer a guide to the natural world, as when Marco relayed his observations to Kublai Khan after various missions, or something more internalized and provocative? Is it a dreamscape, or perhaps the residue of an opium-fueled fantasy?
Marco’s peculiar sensibility stemmed from the decades he spent among the Mongols. Having come of age among them, he thought of himself as one of them; he could think like a Mongol, and see the world as they saw it. As a result, his account offers a view of Asia that is part Western, descriptive and factual, and part Mongol, with a sweeping vision of an animistic universe, and a sense of supernatural forces guiding human endeavors. Although Marco takes pains to present himself as a good Christian, that impression was an overlay created by the conventionally pious Rustichello and enhanced by translators such as Pipino and Ramusio, all of whom sought to bring him back into the embrace of the Church, when, in fact, he was as eclectic as his mentor Kublai Khan in matters of faith, and his belief system was as inclusive and porous as that of the Mongols.
With his habit of incorporating Mongol ways of thought to the point where they were second nature to him, Marco seems, to Western skeptics, to blend fantasy and reality with abandon. This odd mixture, extending beyond the limits of history, both intrigued Europeans and aroused their suspicions. For those willing to accept his vision, Marco’s account offers a kaleidoscopic rendering of Eastern and Western cultures, revealing hidden facets to the reader willing to indulge his occasional foibles.
Yet Marco was a not an explorer in the modern, goal-oriented, scientific sense. He went wherever the winds of fortune carried him. He remained open to the vagaries of experience, constantly adjusting his attitudes to the people, places, and events before him. His lack of a mission made him the most amiable and peaceful of travelers. Although he identified himself as a Christian at the beginning and end of his life, he moved among Muslims, Buddhists, and other religious groups. By example he taught that there is no limit to the possibility of self-invention. In his worldview, the real and the marvelous mingle freely—sometimes harmonizing, sometimes colliding.
With his malleable beliefs and lack of fixed purpose, he was utterly unlike later explorers. His world is enchanted, a place where lands teem with amazons and dragons, spirits and demons. It is a world in which the forces of Christianity have strangely circumscribed powers and merely to survive must constantly do battle against ubiquitous darkness in the form of other gods and other peoples. And it is a world in which magic and logic coexist, although they rarely coincide.
The world Marco Polo explored is in many ways lost to history, but important aspects of his portrayal are strikingly contemporary. As a merchant, he understood that commerce was the essence of international relations, and that it transcended political systems and religious beliefs, all of which, in Marco’s descriptions, are self-limiting. Throughout Marco’s world, people lived according to absolutes, both political and spiritual, but he recognized that in a tumultuous, ever-changing time the only absolute was the power of belief itself.
MARCO’S BOOK found a surprising application: in cartography. There is no evidence that he intended his Travels to serve as a practical field guide to Asia; it was a compendium of information and anecdote, history and myth. In any case, no map of his has survived, if any ever existed. Even if he had drawn maps, or incorporated those made by others, his view of the world was too conventional—Jerusalem at the top, three continents, no knowledge of what later became known as the New World—to be useful to those trying to follow in his footsteps. His basic unit of distance was the rather elastic “day’s journey,” and his concept of direction was subjective rather than scientific. Nevertheless, the Catalonian Jews who worked in Majorca and produced the influential portolan charts and atlases for navigators in the latter part of the fourteenth century scrutinized Marco’s book for features of the world not referred to by other writers and historians, and they incorporated them into their maps. Other European mapmakers followed suit, and considered his references completely reliable—and they were, compared with the often fantastic references in the works of Greek and Roman authors. Perhaps the highest accolade accorded to Marco’s skills in geography came from Fra Mauro, whose celebrated map of the world, dating from 1459 and still displayed in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, includes features gleaned from Marco’s Travels.
Two other maps dating from roughly the same era, those of Giovanni Contarini, published in Venice, and Johann Ruysch, issued in Rome, also incorporated data gleaned from the pages of the Travels. Ruysch remarked that his map contained the features of the interior of East Asia “no longer based on…Marinus of Tyre and Ptolemy…but on more modern reports, especially those of Marco Polo.”
THE MAPMAKERS of the Renaissance expected that legions of other merchants would use their maps to follow in Marco’s footsteps along the Silk Road to Cambulac, but after the death of Kublai Khan, the Mongol Empire rapidly disintegrated. The lesser khans of the domains west of China no longer proclaimed their fealty to the Yüan dynasty and instead embraced Islam. By 1368, Kublai Khan’s descendants were forced to abandon their capital, Cambulac. The end of the Mongol dynasty, and with it the Pax Mongolica, meant that the Silk Road was no longer safe, as it had been in the days when the Polo company had traveled it. The nascent Ming dynasty in China did not share Kublai Khan’s interest in promoting trade with European merchants, nor did the Islamic khans. Trade with the West diminished, and once more China sealed itself off from the rest of the world. The Mongol Empire described by Marco no longer existed; Kublai Khan was gone, and with him the merchants, scientists, and intellectuals he had attracted.
The Mongol population, always sparse, retreated to their original homeland on the arid northern Steppe. Their violent, glorious empire was only a memory set down in Chinese and Mongol annals, and celebrated in The Secret History of the Mongols. Marco had been there at its zenith, and in hisTravels he had preserved its fierce leaders, alluring women, military campaigns, and exotic customs like flies in amber.
KUBLAI’S CHOSEN SUCCESSOR, his grandson Temür, died young, in 1307. After his death the Yüan dynasty stumbled to a chaotic conclusion.
Over the next five decades, the Chinese rose, as they always believed they would. Beginning in 1368, the first Ming emperor, Chu Yüan-chang, pushed the Mongol presence back to its original borders in the north. At the same time, the loose federation of Mongol-controlled states stretching across Asia disintegrated, allowing Islam to spread throughout Persia. Without Mongol forces to guarantee safety, the northern branch of the Silk Road fell into disuse. Had Marco returned to Asia in his later years, he would have been bewildered to learn that the protective paiza given to him by Kublai Khan had become an artifact of a bygone era. And he would have been amazed that his Travels outlasted the seemingly invincible Mongol Empire by centuries. Even today, the world is still catching up to Marco Polo.
LONG AFTER the authenticity of Marco Polo’s account seemed settled, questions—some of them quite understandable, others stubbornly perverse—arose to bedevil his reputation. In 1995, Frances Wood teasingly insisted in Did Marco Polo Go to China? that Marco never went farther than Constantinople and that he compiled his Travels from the accounts of more adventurous travelers. Or perhaps he relied on Persian guidebooks for his information.
That hypothesis had been considered years earlier by Herbert Franke, a German scholar, more as a jest than as a statement of fact. By the time Wood, affiliated with the British Library, revived the issue of Marco’s veracity, indignant scholars were ready for the challenge. They pointed out that no “Persian guidebooks” existed. And when Wood wondered why no Chinese sources mention Marco Polo, they recalled that the modern Chinese scholar Yang Chih-chiu had located a reference to the Polos’ mission to Persia to escort the Mongol princess Kokachin.
Still more provocatively, Wood argued that if Marco had reached China, he surely would have discussed the Great Wall, yet the Travels fails to mention it. So, for that matter, do other written accounts of Marco’s time. There is a very good reason for the omission: the Great Wall had yet to be built.
Arthur N. Waldron, writing in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, demonstrated that the Great Wall was constructed during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), long after Marco Polo’s day. “Let us beware the myth of the Great Wall,” he concluded. “That myth…blossomed in the West almost four centuries ago. While it is a promising subject for students of folklore and myth, it can only mislead the historian.” And Igor de Rachewiltz of the Australian National University noted that Chinese cartographers made no mention of the Great Wall until 1579. “This means that until 1579 the Chinese geographers themselves had ignored the existence of the Wall. No wonder that Marco Polo failed to notice it!”
De Rachewiltz painstakingly showed that nearly all the misunderstanding about the Travels arose not from fabrications but from corruptions of the text and mistranslations. Nor did Marco borrow from other sources to piece together his account. De Rachewiltz wrote: “The sheer fact of having been able to gather so much varied and detailed intelligence about most of thirteenth-century Asia without actually going there is, in my view, an even greater feat than that of compiling a genuine eyewitness account of the magnitude of the Description of the World.”
Even Herbert Franke, who had raised the idea that Marco may have stayed home, rejected it after seeing what Wood tried to make of it. Although Marco—and his collaborator Rustichello—occasionally distorted or omitted elements that some wished had been included, the Venetian delivered a generally truthful account, especially according to the elastic standards of his day.
The most interesting question raised by the global controversy is not whether Marco Polo actually went to China—the evidence overwhelmingly shows that he did—but why the suspicion persists that he did not. The reason could have to do with his particular way of looking at the world. He went east at the age of seventeen, and he came of age in the Mongol Empire, speaking languages he acquired en route, and living in a vibrant ethos combining Mongol, Chinese, Buddhist, Nestorian Christian, and Indian influences—all of which amplified his vocabulary and his thinking. His account reflects his Mongolian coming of age and sensibility, and that may be why it seems so strange and wonderful to many, and so suspect to a few.
THE MODERN TRAVELER seeking to retrace Marco Polo’s route will find much that stubbornly survives from the thirteenth century. In Venice, landmarks such as the Basilica di San Marco and its campanile have hardly changed at all. Visitors seeking further evidence of Marco’s era will find the Corte seconda del Milion, a compact piazza. A new edifice occupies the lot where generations of the Polo family once lived, traded, and litigated, but a few structural elements of the Ca’ Polo and Marco’s old neighborhood exist today. Decorative Byzantine archways, under which Marco once walked, survive intact, artifacts of a bygone era when Venice ruled the seas and traded with the world.
Afghanistan remains as wild and beautiful and dangerous, and as opium-ridden, as it was in the days when the Polo company traversed its mountains on the way to Balkh, and the beginning of the Silk Road. The Pamir highlands are even now as remote and isolated as they were in the thirteenth century, the silence barely disturbed by trucks and cars, with donkeys the preferred method of travel. The Gobi Desert remains inaccessible to all but the most determined traveler, and the Singing Sands still tempt the unwary visitor into oblivion—although these days, the Global Positioning System can help explorers track a precise route through the remotest regions of the planet. Today’s Mongols are as open to foreign influences as they were when Marco first encountered them: they are nomads still, masters of the Steppe, living in gers and surrounded by their livestock as they were during the reign of Kublai Khan, but now satellite dishes stand beside their dwellings. With the departure of the Soviets in 1989, Mongolia became an independent nation, struggling to adapt its nomadic past to the demands of the present.
The ancient Mongolian capital of Karakorum, founded by Genghis Khan as a symbol of national unity, is now a ruin, a faint reminder of the splendor that once animated his rule. One of the few surviving objects from the height of the Mongol Empire is a large granite tortoise, for which a distant mountain is named. It stands alone on a field, awaiting a more fitting resting place. Of Kublai Khan’s magnificent Xanadu, little survives beyond a few evocative mounds rising from a grassy plain, and whispers of lost grandeur carried on the wind.