Unlike the Franciscans who wrote about the Asian world, Marco Polo was neither a missionary nor a spy. The Franciscans that preceded and followed the Polos were Church diplomats. According to the Prologue, the Polo brothers were merchants who became messengers in the other direction, carrying documents from the Mongol court to the Roman Pope. Marco’s own actions represent three Venetian virtues: shrewdness, loyalty to his family and his ability to please his employer, the Great Khan.

After considering all the possible roles Marco ascribes to himself in The Book, Larner concludes that he may have been a mid-level government tax collector. Perhaps he was, as stated in the Prologue, neither more nor less than one of Kublai Khan’s favorite messengers, but the way he describes the world implies familiarity with tax records. Larner’s great insight is how this minor role makes The Book what it truly is. While both the writer and the teller know this world will appear exotic and fantastic to the European reader, for Marco Polo it is simply the world he lived in. While it contains accounts of marvels or miracles, most of the story is simply a man telling us the way things are. The title of the French fifteenth century illustrated version that is often reproduced, Le Livre des Merveilles, is deceptive. The Book of Marco Polo can be best understood not as a Book of Marvels but as a Description of the Normal.

Imperial China, 900-1800
BY F.W. Mote
(Harvard University Press, 2003)

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Mongol tribe unified the steppe peoples of Asia and took military and administrative control of all the agricultural and sedentary cultures touching the steppe. By the end of that century, their power and influence extended from Korea to Syria, from Siberia to Tibet, from China to Persia. This transformation, including their invasion of Europe in 1241-1242, happened before Marco Polo was born. At the time Niccolò Polo presents “my son and your liege man” to Kublai Khan’s court in Cathay, the Mongols ruled a world that was populated by a hundred million subjects. In each conquered region they were foreigners who employed foreigners to rule their “people.” This policy reserved the loyalty of their administrators to their masters, the small group – perhaps two million Mongols now spread across East and Central Asia, the Middle East and Russia – who controlled all resources and all assignments. So our young Venetian went to work as a professional foreigner in a world where professional foreigners were a favored class.

Marco Polo worked in China. F.W. Mote’s recent history of China explains that the Medieval European social concepts of distinctly urban and rural populations, and class distinctions such as nobles and serfs, do not translate the social order that existed in this Chinese world. In the thirteenth century, most European cities were semi-independent trade centers and most European farmers worked on land that was owned not by their own clans or tribes but by another noble class. Quite the opposite was true in thirteenth-century China. Cities of all sizes were administered by the central state. Farmers and town dwellers owned their property. The urban, suburban and rural populations of the Chinese states were far more integrated than they were in the European world, and each central state far more accepted as the principle of a shared order.

This was the Chinese culture the Mongols had conquered. Kublai had declared himself Great Khan in 1260, the same year Marco’s father and uncle began their careers as international traders. Marco Polo left Venice in 1271, at the age of seventeen, to accompany his father and uncle on their return to Kublai’s court. They returned to Venice twenty-four years later in 1295. The years when Marco was an official in China was a time when the role of official was given almost exclusively to foreigners, many of whom were recruited from Persia and Central Asia to control the ordinary people of Cathay (the north) and the newly conquered territory of Mangi (the south).

In this normal world, any official, even a foreigner from Venice, could travel from city to city, through well-populated suburbs and farmland, and always be given a new horse and a comfortable place to sleep as he went about his business for the Great Khan. If he spoke Mongol, Turkish and Persian, he could communicate with the other officials who, like himself, were not Chinese.