Before I read the comic, someone at school had pointed out that Kublai Khan shared my family name, and had started calling me Kublai. I had no idea whether to be proud or embarrassed. I had seen King David and King Solomon in illustrated books at Hebrew School, but as far as I could tell Kublai wasn’t Jewish. Marco Polo assured me that Kublai was the most powerful, wise and beneficent king of the East. He was the wise Emperor of China, a place of enormous size and wealth. In the comic he looked Chinese, but he was a Mongol or Moghul (perhaps he lived in the Taj Mahal) or a Manchu (he looked like Fu Manchu). The old king was fond of Marco and his family, but he was getting old. The message of the story was clear. Marco had to leave this paradise and go back to being just another grown-up. When he returned from Cathay to Europe, now a grown man, he was captured in a sea battle and thrown into prison. Gazing at the sky through a small stone window in his cell, he wrote the true story of his adventures, which I held in my hands as the hamburgers went by on the train and Elvis sang about love and dogs.

Marco Polo’s book presents a portrait of the world where a traveler can ride for years from one rich and sophisticated city to the next. From the time it was composed, it proved to be so compelling that it was reproduced in multiple manuscripts and translated into a dozen European languages. It was translated and copied so many times with so many variations in the text that it may be impossible to determine what the original version contained. Many details are puzzling but compared to other 700-year-old books, it requires little explanation. The theme of the book seems self-evident. Marco Polo went to Asia and came back to single-handedly inject an account of China and the Mongol Empire into the European cultural record.

Marco Polo Travelling
FROM The Travels of Marco Polo (Il milione), 1324
PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

The singularity of his account is an innocent illusion. We cannot find Marco Polo guilty of being unaware that others had or would write their own accounts of the time and place he describes. And the readers who share this illusion are innocent as well, as the other accounts have always been very difficult to find.

The most findable are the reports of travels from Eastern Europe to Mongolia known as the Tartar Relations. Two Franciscan monks, Giovanni da Pian del Carpine from Perugia, and William of Rubruck, born in Flanders, each wrote accounts of their separate diplomatic missions to the Mongol capital city of Karakorum in the decades before Marco Polo. Their descriptions of the Mongol beliefs and practices, and of the city that flourished in the Mongol homeland for forty years are the most detailed eye-witness accounts that survive in any language. But both men were writing intelligence reports and their description of the East was limited to the steppe lands between the Black Sea and Mongolia. They did not see Persia, China or India.

Two more Italian accounts exist in libraries and are described in books about the period. A generation after Marco Polo, Odorico da Pordenone, another Franciscan from northern Italy, wrote about his travels through Persia, India, and by sea to Southeast Asia and the cities of China in the early fourteenth century. A short time after Odorico returned from his travels, Niccolò da Conti recorded a description of his decades working in the trading network between India and south China, Persia, Arabia and Egypt. Conti was yet another Venetian merchant who spent most of his life outside of Europe.

Nearly impossible to find is The Flower of Histories of the East, a description of Asia dictated by the Armenian Prince Hetoum to his French secretary at the beginning of the fourteenth century. His Armenian homeland was a part of the Mongol kingdom at the time and his information about the geography and history of Asia was substantially accurate. But like the earlier Franciscans, Hetoum did not travel south to India or east to China.

Each author was entirely unaware of his predecessors and few people have read all these accounts. Their manuscripts were copied and circulated during the centuries before printing. But none of them appealed to the broad audience that read or listened to The Book of Marco Polo. The other accounts may be accurate and insightful but they are not very entertaining.