Marco Polo

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Marco Polo

Born 1254

Died 1324

Italian explorer

T he journeys of Marco Polo were as remarkable in the Middle Ages as travel to another planet would be in modern times, and the information he brought back to Europe greatly expanded human knowledge. But his stories about faraway lands sounded so outrageous, and involved so many big numbers, that his neighbors nicknamed him "Marco Millions."

Setting out from his hometown of Venice, Italy, with his father and uncle in 1271, Marco was only seventeen years old when he began his travels. It would be twenty-four years before he returned to Europe, and during that time he would see half the known world. He would also have a series of amazing adventures, and would become personally acquainted with one of the medieval world's most remarkable rulers, Kublai Khan (see entry).

Venice and Cathay

In Marco Polo's time Venice was a powerful city-state, home to merchants and voyagers such as his father, Nicolo, and uncle, Maffeo. When Marco was six, Nicolo and Maffeo left Venice for Cathay (kah-THY), the name by which many Europeans knew China. At that time, China was under the control of the Mongols, nomadic warriors from Central Asia who conquered much of the world in the early 1200s.

Nicolo and Maffeo did not return for nine years, and during that time, Marco's mother died. When the two brothers came back to Venice in 1269, they came with a request from Kublai Khan (KOOB-luh; 1215–1294; ruled 1260–1294), the Mongol ruler of China, to the pope, head of the Catholic Church. The Great Khan, who respected all religions, wanted the pope to send a vial of holy oil, as well as a hundred religious teachers for his people. The Polos could not immediately obtain either, however, since the old pope had died and a new one had not yet been elected. An election could take months, and Nicolo and Maffeo were eager to begin their trip; therefore they set out for Cathay in 1271, taking seventeen-year-old Marco with them.

The adventure begins

They reached the city of Acre (AHK-ruh), an important church center in what is now Israel. There they met Tebaldo Visconti, a priest and representative of the Vatican—the pope's headquarters in Rome—who gave them letters for the Khan. From Acre they headed north to Cilicia (suh-LISH-uh), a region in southeastern Asia Minor, where they received word that a new pope had been elected: Tebaldo himself, who became Gregory X (ruled 1271–76). Therefore they returned to Acre, where Gregory blessed a vial of oil for the Khan.

As for teachers, however, Gregory could only spare two monks—and in the end, those two turned back when they realized how dangerous the trip to Cathay would be. But the Polos themselves were finally on their way, and they headed to Ormuz (ohr-MOOZ), a major seaport in Persia. The boats they saw there did not look particularly sturdy, however; therefore they decided to strike out for China over land.

A perilous journey

Today one can fly from Venice to Beijing, the Chinese capital—which under the reign of the Khans was called Khanbalik

(kahn-bah-LEEK)—in a few hours; Marco's journey, by contrast, took more than three years. He spent more than a year of that time in the mountains of Afghanistan, stricken with an unknown illness. Perhaps it was during this time that his father and uncle taught him the language of the Mongols, which they had mastered on their earlier trip. Marco also learned Farsi, or Persian, a common tongue for travelers and tradesmen in the East.

Finally, however, the Polos were able to resume their journey eastward, which took them across the Pamir (puh-MEER) range between Afghanistan and China. The Pamirs are among the world's highest mountains, and the journey—during which Marco saw an animal that came to be called the "Marco Polo sheep"—was a difficult one.

Coming down off the mountains, the travelers entered China itself, and for a long way, the going was relatively easy. Then they came to the Gobi Desert, which is nearly the size of Alaska. It took the Polos thirty days of hard traveling to cross this extremely inhospitable region, even though they did so at its narrowest part. At night, the desert winds became so fierce they played tricks on the journeyers' minds, and Marco later reported hearing voices calling to him in the chilly darkness.

In the court of the Great Khan

Having crossed the Gobi, the Polos found themselves in the heart of China. They followed the Yellow River, one of that country's great waterways, until they met representatives of the Great Khan who led them to Shang-tu (shahng-DOO). The latter, known to Europeans by the name Xanadu (ZAN-uh-doo), was the Khan's summer residence, some three hundred miles north of Beijing.

Though he must have seen China's Great Wall, Marco never recorded the event. Yet there was much to impress him when he and his father and uncle arrived at the court of the Great Khan in May 1275. Kublai Khan, Marco later wrote, "is the greatest Lord that is now in the world or ever has been."

Marco found the court at Shang-tu splendid, but not as luxurious as the Khan's palace in Beijing. There, he reported, the Khan's four wives were attended by some forty thousand servants, and Marco himself dined at a banquet where some six thousand guests were served all manner of delicacies.

As it turned out, Kublai was as impressed with Marco as Marco was with him. While his father and uncle became involved in several successful business ventures, Marco spent most of his time at court. During the corruption trial of an official, he testified regarding the man's dishonest actions, thus showing his loyalty to the Khan. The latter therefore appointed him to a series of offices which, over the next years, would vastly extend the scope of Marco's already extraordinary travels.

Visions of the East

The Khan first sent Marco to the province of Yunnan (yoo-NAHN), wedged between Tibet and Southeast Asia at China's southwestern fringe. Marco thus became the first European to see Tibet, one of the world's most remote and exotic lands. For three years beginning in 1282, he served as governor of Yangchow (yahng-ZHOH), a city along the Grand Canal of the Yangtze River (YAHNG-say) in east central China.

In the latter part of his governorship, Marco received orders to travel even farther: to India. On his way there, he visited a number of lands in southeast Asia: Champa, a kingdom in what is now central Vietnam; Thailand; Melaka, now part of Malaysia; and the island of Sumatra in modern Indonesia.

Crossing the enormous Bay of Bengal, Marco's boat touched land in the Andaman Islands, a part of India so remote that its people had never been exposed either to Hinduism or Buddhism, the country's two principal religions. The ship then sailed southward, to the island of Ceylon (seh-LAHN), the modern nation of Sri Lanka.

The way back

Marco probably arrived back in Beijing in 1287, when he was thirty-three years old. His aging father and uncle were ready to return home, but the Khan wanted them to stay; two years later, however, in 1289, Kublai allowed the three Europeans to accompany a Mongol princess to Persia, where she would marry the Mongol khan of that land. Various difficulties delayed their departure for some time, but finally in January 1292 the princess and the Polos, along with some six hundred passengers and crew on fourteen ships, set sail.

It was another long trip, taking nearly two years, during which time most of the passengers and crew died. Arriving in Ormuz, the Polos learned that Kublai was dead. It must have been with some sadness that they headed northward across land to the city of Trabzon (trab-ZAHN) on the Black Sea. From Trabzon they sailed to Constantinople, and on to Venice, and by the time they reached home in 1295, they had been gone nearly a quarter-century.

A teller of tall tales

But Marco's adventures were not over. Venice had gone to war with Genoa, another leading Italian city, and he became captain of a warship. In 1298, he was captured and thrown in a Genoese prison, where he met a writer named Rustichello (rus-ti-CHEL-oh).

Ibn Battuta

His full name was Abu 'Abd Allah Muhammad ibn 'Abd Allah al-Lawati at-Tanji ibn Battuta; fortunately for non-Arabic speakers, however, he is known to history simply as Ibn Battuta (IB'n bah-TOO-tah; 1304–c. 1368). In spite of the fact that Marco Polo is much more well known outside the Arab world, in fact Ibn Battuta traveled much more widely. Over the space of twenty-nine years from 1325 to 1354, he covered some seventy-five thousand miles, three times the distance around Earth at the Equator—a particularly impressive feat at a time when the average person had seldom traveled more than a few miles from home.

Ibn Battuta was born into a wealthy family in the Moroccan city of Tangier (tan-JEER). He originally planned to study law, and when he went away on his first long journey at the age of twenty-one, he did so with the intention of later settling down. Like most people in Tangier, Ibn Battuta was a devout Muslim, or follower of the Islamic religion established by Muhammad (see entry), and he planned to serve as an Islamic religious judge. His first trip, in fact, was a pilgrimage to the Muslim holy city of Mecca in what is now Saudi Arabia. This type of pilgrimage, called a hajj (HAHZH), is sacred to Islam, and all Muslims are encouraged to do it at least once. By the time of his death, Ibn Battuta had made the hajj a total of four times.

After his first hajj (1325–27), Ibn Battuta made a side trip into Persia. He returned to Mecca, thus completing a second hajj, then sailed along the east African coast to the trading city of Kilwa in the far south before returning to Mecca yet again in 1330. But he was just getting started: over the next three years, he journeyed through Turkey, the Byzantine Empire, and southern Russia, at that time part of the Mongol lands. He then passed through Afghanistan and other parts of Central Asia before entering India from the north.

Eventually Ibn Battuta wound up in the court of the ruthless sultan Muhammad

ibn Tughluq (tug-LUK; ruled 1325–51; see box in Ala-ud-din Muhammad Khalji entry) in the great Indian city of Delhi (DEL-ee). Despite Tughluq's blood-thirsty reputation, Ibn Battuta managed to remain in his service as a judge for eight years. Tughluq sent him on an official visit to the Mongol emperor of China, a later successor to Kublai Khan, but Ibn Battuta was shipwrecked, and never returned to Tughluq's court.

During the next few years, Ibn Battuta visited Ceylon, Southeast Asia, and China—possibly even as far north as the capital at Beijing. He then made the long journey home, stopping in Mecca a fourth time; but he quickly headed out again, this time to Muslim Spain and then south, across the Sahara into the splendid African empire of Mali.

Ibn Battuta stopped traveling in 1354, after which he sat down to write the record of his journeys in a volume translated as The Travels of Ibn Battuta. Along with all the other activity that filled his life, Ibn Battuta had many wives and children, and died when he was more than sixty years old.

Marco told Rustichello about his travels, and Rustichello began writing a book that would become known in English as The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, or The Description of the World. The book would later be recognized as the basis for scientific geography, and greatly expanded Europeans' understanding of the world. Prior to Marco's mention of the Pamirs, for instance, no one in Europe had ever heard of those mountains. He was also the first European to describe places such as Tibet and Burma, lands that would not be visited again by people from the West until the 1800s.

Marco introduced Europeans to a wealth of new ideas, from paper money to playing cards. In addition, his book excited the interest of future explorers, among them Portugal's Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460; see entry), who virtually launched the Age of Exploration when he ordered a number of Portuguese voyages around the coast of Africa. The record of the Polos' difficult journey also affected a young sailor from Genoa named Christopher Columbus, who in 1492 set out to reach Cathay by sailing west—and instead discovered the New World.

Modern scholars believe Marco's reports to be amazingly accurate, though many of his neighbors had a hard time believing his tall tales. Later he married, had three daughters, and became a modestly successful merchant, but his reputation followed him to his death at age seventy. Relatives tried to get him to renounce what they thought were lies about deserts full of whispering voices and banquets with six thousand guests, but he refused; on his deathbed he announced, "I have not told half of what I saw."

For More Information

Books

Hull, Mary. The Travels of Marco Polo. San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 1995.

MacDonald, Fiona. Marco Polo: A Journey through China. Illustrated by Mark Bergin, created and designed by David Salariya. New York: Franklin Watts, 1998.

MacDonald, Fiona. The World in the Time of Marco Polo. Parsippany, NJ: Dillon Press, 1997.

Roth, Susan L. Marco Polo: His Notebook. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

Twist, Clint. Marco Polo: Overland to Medieval China. Austin, TX: Raintree Steck-Vaughn, 1994.

Web Sites

Ibn Battuta's Trip. [Online] Available http://www.sfusd.k12.ca.us/schwww/sch618/islam/nbLinks/Ibn_Battuta_map_sites.html (last accessed July 26, 2000).

"Marco Polo and His Travels." Silkroad Foundation. [Online] Available http://www.silk-road.com/artl/marcopolo.shtml (last accessed July 26, 2000).

Marco Polo: His Travels and Their Effects on the World. [Online] Available http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Maze/5099/sld001.html (last accessed July 26, 2000).