Travelers
Marco Polo and the Silk Road
Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant whose account of his travels in Asia became the most famous travel book of the medieval world, is the best-known of all…
Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant whose account of his travels in Asia became the most famous travel book of the medieval world, is the best-known of all Silk Road travelers. His book, known in Italian as Il Milione and in English as The Travels of Marco Polo, gave European readers their first detailed picture of the court of Kublai Khan, of the cities of China and Southeast Asia, and of the Mongol Empire that, in the late thirteenth century, ruled the entire land corridor of the Silk Road. The book shaped European ideas about Asia for centuries and helped to inspire the age of European overseas exploration. A wider discussion of the travelers who made the network possible is given in the article on famous Silk Road travelers.
The Polo family were established merchants of Venice, and Marco’s father Niccolò and his uncle Maffeo had been engaged in long-distance trade in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea for many years before Marco’s birth in 1254. In 1260 or 1261, the two brothers set out on a trading expedition that took them to Constantinople, to the Genoese colony of Caffa in the Crimea, and eventually to the court of Kublai Khan in the Mongol capital of Shangdu (or, in the Polo tradition, “Cambaluc,” the modern Beijing). They remained in Mongol Asia for several years and returned to Venice in 1269.
The journey to Kublai Khan
In 1271, when Marco was about seventeen, the two brothers set out again, this time with the young Marco himself, and traveled to the Mongol court by the long overland route through the Black Sea, the Volga, the Central Asian oases, and the Pax Mongolica’s protected corridors. The journey took about three and a half years. Three and a half years, with stops, with winters in some provincial city, with the long slow haul across the Pamirs. They reached the court in 1275, by which time Marco was about twenty-one. The reason for the journey, by Marco’s own account, was to deliver a letter from the pope to the Great Khan, although the Polos may also have had commercial purposes — I have always suspected there was more to it than that, and Niccolò was a trader first, a diplomat only by necessity.
The Polos were received by Kublai Khan and inducted into the Mongol service. Marco, who was young, learned languages quickly (the book says he acquired four languages in Asia, including Mongolian and the “common Tartar” language), and was sent on a number of official missions to the southern and western provinces of the Mongol Empire. He may have served for a time as a tax official in the city of Yangzhou, in the lower Yangtze valley, and the book describes journeys he claimed to have made to the southern Chinese provinces, to Burma, to Vietnam, to Sri Lanka, and to the Indian Ocean. In my view the Yangzhou detail is the single most useful piece of evidence for Marco’s actual presence in China proper — the Chinese Yuan-era source Yuan shi mentions a foreign tax official in that city in those years, though it does not name him.
Marco Polo is, for many readers, the only Silk Road traveler they can name.
The Polos remained in Asia for about seventeen years. The book, dictated later, is full of specific details about the cities, customs, and economies of the regions through which the travelers passed, and many of the details can be cross-checked against other sources. The account of Hangzhou, the southern Chinese capital of the Song dynasty, is particularly detailed and admiring: the Polos described it as the finest and most splendid city in the world, larger and more magnificent than Venice itself. Popular accounts tend to undersell how good a piece of reportage the Hangzhou chapter actually is — it is the most detailed eyewitness description of late Song urban life that survives in any European language, and the 1903 Yule edition runs to several dozen pages of commentary on it alone.
The return and the book
The Polos left the Mongol court in 1292, accompanying a Mongol princess who was being sent to the Persian Ilkhanate. The journey, by sea from southern China to Hormuz and then overland through Persia, took about two years, and the Polos remained in the Ilkhanate for several years before returning to Venice in 1295. The wealth that the Polos brought back established Marco as one of the most prominent citizens of the Venetian merchant community.
In 1298 Venice was at war with Genoa, and Marco Polo was captured in a naval engagement and imprisoned in Genoa. In prison he met the romance writer Rustichello of Pisa, who was also a prisoner, and the two collaborated on the book that became Il Milione. Rustichello, working from Marco’s dictation and his own literary conventions, produced a text that combined personal narrative, geographical description, and fantastic tales. The book was an immediate sensation, was translated into many European languages, and remained the principal European account of Asia until the Portuguese voyages of the late fifteenth century. I have always thought the prison setting matters more than the biographers admit — the book is, in form, a romance, and Rustichello was a writer of Arthurian romances, not a chronicler, and his hand is on more of the text than is usually acknowledged.
The reliability of the book has been debated for centuries. Some scholars have argued that Marco never reached China; modern scholarship generally accepts that he did, and the book’s basic geographical framework is sound. The book’s many specific details — the use of paper currency, the burning of coal as domestic fuel, the imperial postal system, the Mongol administration of subject peoples — all correspond to what is known from Chinese and other Asian sources. A point that is often missed: most of the older “Marco never went to China” arguments were written before this body of Chinese-source evidence had been systematically collected, and the skepticism of the nineteenth century is largely a relic of the state of the field in 1900, not a permanent feature of it.
The original manuscript of Il Milione does not survive. The earliest manuscripts are three fourteenth-century French versions and one Italian; the standard modern critical edition is the one edited by Cesare Segre for Mondadori, and the most readable English translation is still the 1903 Yule (reprinted by Dover), with its Victorian apparatus of footnotes and asides. If you only read one English-language edition, read Yule. The Penguin Classics Latham (1958) is more careful about the textual problems but is, frankly, drier.
A personal note
The most readable English translation of Marco Polo is the old Henry Yule (1903), with its extensive commentary and annotations. The most academically careful modern translation is the Penguin Classics edition (Latham, 1958). The reader who wants the experience of the book should read Yule first, with the commentary, and then come back to Latham for the textual problems.
Further reading
- Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012).
- Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road, 2nd ed. (2015).
- The relevant Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History chapter for the region or period.