Marco Polo has been my companion throughout my life. By the time I was born he was firmly ensconced in the pantheon of heroes transported to America from the European past. He was a figure from a time-space called the Middle Ages, along with Robin Hood and King Arthur, where men wore tights, fought with swords and staffs and wore funny hats. This was not a place of well-defined chronology, geography or correspondence to modern nations. It was simply after the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans and before the discovery of the New World. Marco Polo was neither a noble thief nor a mystical king. He was an adventurer and wanderer, the man who knew how large the world truly was.

The Adventures of Marco Polo
Classics Illustrated, No. 27
New York: Gilberton Company, Inc., 1946

Marco Polo was from a place called Venice, a town whose canals and bridges were reproduced on the walls of many Italian restaurants. I had a sense that he came from a different part of our past than other heroes. I first met him in a kind of general store where toys, paper and school supplies were sold, a place to stop between home and school and spend some pocket change. There was candy, gum and soda along with newspapers and magazine. Among the magazines were racks of comic books. The adventures of super heroes were issued every month, each one dressed in tights with lightning emanating from his fist and a grimace of rage wrapped around his face. These narratives were colorful but predictable. Along the back shelf, often buried underneath the current Green Lantern or the Justice League of America, were graphic versions of stories taken from European and American books, the Classic Illustrated comics. The Man in the Iron Mask, The Tale of Two Cities and The Count of Monte Cristo proved to be good comic books. They all took place before atomic bombs and rocket ships. It was the best and the worst of times, and people were riding in horse-drawn carriages with feathers sticking out of their hats.

The store where I found the comics was close to a luncheonette — The Hamburger Depot. Here a model train carried orders along the wall to each booth equipped with a silver jukebox. The culture that surrounded me in school, television and cinema — Paul Bunyan and Rumplestilskin, Pinocchio and Snow White – was a mélange of American and European folklore. It was much easier to look at the pictures than to process nineteenth-century descriptive prose. I preferred the comics to the books in the library.

I read the colorful Classics Illustrated version of The Adventures of Marco Polo sitting in a booth at The Hamburger Depot. In retrospect, this proved to be an excellent introduction to a book that has attracted, repulsed, confounded and puzzled men of great learning for seven centuries. As I flipped the pages, a teenage customer dropped a dime into the jukebox and chose a song by Elvis Presley. I could see immediately that young Marco, who was a teenager when he left Venice, wore tights and a floppy hat. When fighting the Moslems, whose faces were always dark, he rode a white horse. When being introduced to a white-skinned Princess Silver Bells, he knew how to be polite. The skin of Kublai, his king, was a shade of yellow. Kublai had long fingernails, wore an embroidered gown with big sleeves and a tall hat. He ruled the kingdom of Cathay, which was a marvelous place.

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.

Just as printing began, the humanist Giambattista Ramusio edited and translated his collection of Marco Polo manuscripts into a unified Italian book. It was Ramusio who declared the accomplishments of his fellow Venetian to be the greatest the world had ever seen. Once Ramusio’s edition became a printed book, The Book of Marco Polo became the most well-known record of its time. Of all the descriptions of Asia before ocean-crossing ships brought Europeans to every part of the planet, only Marco Polo’s description of the world has been popular from the time it was first written to the present day.

Many well-known books are not well understood. I was in a bookstore one day, looking for a book to read, and chose the Penguin paperback edition of The Travels of Marco Polo. I thought it was finally time to read the book itself. Once I read it, I became fascinated by the layers of transmission that brought it to my attention. I have become a devotee of Marco Polo’s book, the imagination of the book’s nineteenth- and twentieth- century illustrators, and the books written about The Book. Of all the recent examples of books about The Book – and there are many recent examples – John Larner’s Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (1999) is the best. It is the work of a man who reads many languages and constructs arguments by entertaining all sides of a disagreement with taste and candor. He provides the most convincing explanation of where the Venetian and his collaborator came from and the European world that received and popularized their book.

The reader is to understand that the recording of these stories, like the rest of the Polos’ adventures, is an opportunity born from adversity.

Larner explains a wide range of misconceptions about the author and the book. Polo has been called an exaggerator, a liar, a proto-colonialist, a wise man, a complete fabrication, a hero of the Venetian Republic, and a great explorer. The Book has been described as a romance tale, a geography of the world, a record of extraordinary travels, and a manual for fellow merchants hoping to enter the silk and spice trade. Larner enumerates all these descriptions and then explains how none are entirely correct.

After reading Larner’s book, I felt that I had finally understood why The Book was written. In the Prologue, the writer — Messer Rustichello of Pisa — states that he has written a book from the stories that Messer Marco Polo of Venice has provided him. Both men have the time to create this book because they are prisoners in Genoa. The reader is to understand that the recording of these stories, like the rest of the Polos’ adventures, is an opportunity born from adversity. Rustichello also reports that Marco Polo feels it a pity if he did not record his experiences for others to learn of the world he has seen.

Then Rustichello writes about what Marco Polo has seen. His Franco-Italian language is filled with repetitions of clichés. Before becoming a prisoner in Genoa, Rustichello had written the Méliadus, a collection of stories about King Arthur. Larner points out that entire passages from this earlier work reappear word for word in The Book of Marco Polo. One of these plagiarized sections — if copying from your own work can be called plagiarism — is the arrival of the Polos at the court of Kublai. The language in this passage is identical to Rustichello’s description of “the reception of Tristan at the court of Camelot” in his earlier work. Anyone who finds in these sentences proof of how well young Marco was received is mistaking figures of speech for eye-witness account.

The reader can see a man standing on a stage before an assembled court, a powerful guild or town council, waving his hand back and forth as he recounts the stories. Each rhetorical “what more can I say?” leads to the next “Let me tell you about these marvels: forms of money used – the quantities of silk produced – number of ships in their harbors – the number of troops stationed at each gate.” And after each enumeration the story continues onward to the next part of the world, “On leaving Kinsai the travelers proceeds southwest for a day’s journey, through a country filled with delightful mansions, villages and gardens” and so on and so on.

Once we pass the Prologue, it is difficult to distinguish the writer and the teller. The “we”, “he” or “I” of the voice shifts frequently. Neither the writer nor the teller is what we would now call an ethnographer. Rustichello shapes the stories that he writes, but he rarely comments on them. Marco Polo notices the beliefs and practices around him, but he is not very interested in precisely who believes what. He identifies the subjects of the Great Khan by terms that mix religious practices and regionalism: Saracens, idolaters, sorcerers, Cathayans, Manzians, Nestorian Christians. If we imagine that all medieval Europeans saw the world in terms of Us and Them, we see that Marco Polo is rather open-minded. He recognizes a world filled with many Thems, none of which are exactly like Us, even those who identified themselves as Christians.

Despite his reputation, Marco Polo was not an explorer. An explorer sets out to find a previously unknown place. Marco Polo tells us about places that are already known. He reports very little about the journey or journeys that gave him this knowledge. The locations in the story move the reader-listener from place to place, but we rarely have any news of how he traveled or what he did when he visited a specific place. We learn almost nothing about Marco Polo as a person. His description of the world contains no stories of personal conflict, romantic attachments, spiritual confrontations or personal exploits. The few exceptions to this – his claim that he served as governor of a Chinese city; that he, his father and uncle were responsible for creating the war machines for the Mongol victory over an important Chinese fortress – are among the details that are arguably false. The Chinese sources do not mention his name among the governors of the period. Other sources mention foreign engineers building the war machines during the battle he refers to, but these same sources make it clear that the battle occurred at a time before the Polos arrived in Cathay. I imagine these assertions of personal importance as moments in the collaboration when the writer’s desire to impress his audience overcame the teller’s reticence. “Okay,” I hear Marco saying to Rustacello, “You can say I was governor of that city. Now, let’s get on with it.”

The main message of the book is that Marco Polo, his father and his uncle all worked for the court of Kublai Khan, a king who ruled a vast part of the world. The only description of Marco’s job is in the Prologue:

This story is the key for the rest of the narrative. Our hero tells stories “well and shrewdly” to inform and impress his audience. Whether the anecdote is the truth or not, it is clearly Rustichello’s way of explaining how Marco Polo came to know more of the world than any other man. It is also the framework for building an entertaining description of the world.

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.

In his description of China, Marco Polo recounts the names of cities and categorizes them with sets of attributes.

Marco Polo describes the abundance he passes through in these terms. Being a foreigner, he knew little about the local culture. He had access to stories of recent Mongol conquest, tales he may have heard from other officials, but he demonstrates no awareness of the two thousand years of Chinese history. The world he describes is a place where people recognize the authority of the central state and do business as part of the centralized economy. This economy was defined by the acceptance of paper money, an innovation introduced by Kublai which Marco describes in some details. To further describe the economy, he enumerates the useful products these people produce: silk, rice, cloth, paper, vegetables and fruit.

Instead he describes a world in which the possibilities for profitable trade are to be found everywhere. In his description of the world, trade is carried on by everyone he sees.

We now understand from Persian, Mongolian and Chinese sources that the steppe people who conquered eastern Asia practiced and accepted a diverse collection of religious beliefs. Shamanism, Daoism, Confucianism, Nestorian Christianity, Chan (Zen) Buddhism, Tantric (Tibetan) Buddhism, Sunni and Shia Islam were all present in this normal world and accepted by Kublai’s court as valid religions. The audience of The Book knew only two religions, Roman and Eastern Christianity, and one enemy, Islam. Marco Polo observes the other religious beliefs and practices as his description moves through various parts of Central Asia, China and India. The differences among many of these religions escape his notice. He does not recognize the Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist or Hindu statues and iconography he sees in the temples of China and Southeast Asia as different religions. When he describes China he observes the common feature a European could understand: the people of this city worship idols and cremate their dead. In India, outside of this normal world, his attention to details grows significantly. His description of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) includes perhaps the earliest European version of the life of Buddha. It is no worse than Herman Hesse’s popular novel Siddhartha, and much briefer. He also includes an admiring account of the ascetic practices of Hindu sadhus.

Larner points out that, despite the legend that a copy was available in Venice as a reference book for merchants, The Book is not a practical guide for European traders. One of those great missing details in The Book is any description of Marco Polo’s daily tasks during his decades away from Venice. The practical details of trading are missing, such as what to buy in this city and where to sell it or exchange it for other goods. Instead he describes a world in which the possibilities for profitable trade are to be found everywhere. In his description of the world, trade is carried on by everyone he sees. Rice, spices and silk are moving along the rivers and canals of Cathay. Woven fabrics are moving from India to Persia to Armenia. He reports on the places where precious minerals are plentiful. He tells us where gold is traded for silver at favorable rates, and where silver is exchanged for cowry shells.

While he does not focus on the details of trading, he does focus on quantities. Whether he was working as a tax official, a messenger or a trader, he explains the world in terms of numbers. Larner proposes that this is the result of a Venetian, rather than an ecclesiastical or classical, education. Marco’s most vivid descriptions are reserved for the three places he is sure will impress his European readers: Kublai’s summer residence of Shangdu, the new capital of Dadu (Beijing) and the newly conquered Song capital of Kinsai (Hangzhou). Whether he spent most of his time in these places is impossible to say. The purpose of these descriptions is not to report on his life. The purpose is to impress his audience with a vision of grandeur far greater than anything in Europe.

When the Mongol army took Hangzhou in 1276, it was the largest city on the planet. Population figures are not part of Marco Polo’s vocabulary. He describes the city’s size by invoking enormous numbers, saying the circumference of the city is 100 miles and that it contains 12,000 bridges. This same figure of 12,000 bridges shows up in the Odorico da Pordenone account, which suggests that the Chinese may have used it in the same way Americans describe Minnesota as “the land of a thousand lakes.” The figures that seem like incredible exaggerations may have simply been a way of saying “big”. At the same time, some of the numbers he gives are remarkably precise. Jacques Gernet estimates the population of Hangzhou in 1276 based on Chinese sources as well over one million.^[1] F.W. Mote points out that the Chinese method of counting households rather than individuals resulted in low estimates of actual population numbers. Without reference to the science of demography, Marco Polo produces an accurate population estimate of the world’s largest city by counting pounds of pepper consumed.

I can imagine a discussion between Marco Polo and the writer, Rustichello. Marco announces he will now describe the most enormous city he ever saw. Rustichello translates the Venetian monologue into courtly Franco-Italian. As he comes to the end of his description of a market district filled with more people than he had ever seen in one place, Marco reaches for the notes he saved from his travels. He dictates numbers that Rustichello embeds in the description of how the city operates. It takes the form of a “word-problem,” the kind of narrative arithmetic we all once faced in elementary school:

If we solve the arithmetic in his word-problem, we get the following result. Forty-three carts times 223 pounds is 9,589 pounds of pepper. That is 153,424 ounces or 4,349,497 grams in modern measure. If we assume that a citizen of Kinsai consumed three grams of pepper each day, the forty-three cart-loads are feeding 1,449,832 people.

Marco Polo is much better at arithmetic than he is at historical narrative. He does not compare or contrast the grandeur of Kublai Khan’s Cathay with the former grandeur of Imperial Rome or Constantinople. He is an historical illiterate relying entirely on oral tradition. His account of Asian history is limited to the stories that he hears about the places in his normal Asian world. And these stories are further limited by decisions of the writer and teller as to which tales were worth telling.

Yet the stories he tells have proven over the centuries to be the starting point for countless European readers to fill in the gaps. The “true” historical narrative is a modern phenomenon. Our current sense of truth includes many things that Marco Polo did not care about.

He is an historical illiterate relying entirely on oral tradition. His account of Asian history is limited to the stories that he hears about the places in his normal Asian world.

When I read The Travels as an adult, I was hoping to learn who the Mongols really were from a man who knew them. The mix of references I had in my head at the time produced a puzzling question. Why did Genghis Khan appear to be “a man of great ability and wisdom” to Marco Polo, and a figure of destruction to others?

Marco Polo’s audience lived in a world circumscribed by the Mediterranean and North Atlantic. They knew as little about the nomads of Central Asia as they did about any people beyond those shores. Tartaros, the common Latin name for the steppe lands in thirteenth century Europe, came from a Greek term for the place in Hades where the Titans were imprisoned, and so he calls the people to the east of Black Sea Tartars. The way Marco describes this region is methodical, entertaining and marvelously incomplete.

After the Prologue and a description of Armenia and Persia, the reader is drawn on an imaginary journey to the east-north-east. We are told of a great desert, difficult to cross, consisting “entirely of mountains and sand and valleys.” Perhaps he is describing what is now Xinjiang in western China. We are told about the Tanghut and Uighur populations, cultures that still survive in this region of contemporary China. The people are described as a mixed population of idolaters (in this case we can surmise he was describing Buddhists), Muslims and Nestorian Christians. Marco entertains the reader by describing their strange marriage and funeral practices, their agricultural production and their centers of learning devoted to liberal arts. His description ends with an enigmatic detail:

The name of the city where they stayed is given as Kan-chau in some versions, Campichu in others. Precisely what city this name refers to and what the Polos did there for a year is a complete mystery.

Polo brothers in the court of Kublai Khan.
Khan gives them a tablet (paiza), ca. 1410-1412
FROM Historia, n° 764, août 2010,, p. 98
BY Maître de la mazarine et collab.
PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

As the story enters the Mongolian steppe, the writer promises: “I will now tell you all about the Tartars and how they acquired their empire and spread throughout the world.” In Marco’s version, the Mongols came from a region in the north to become subjects of Prester John. The source of the Prester John legend may have been a wish-fulfilling manuscript circulated during the Crusader invasions of Lebanon-Israel-Palestine, the area that is politically difficult to name in our own time. The Prester John legend described a powerful Christian king in the east who would join the Crusaders to defeat their enemies in the Islamic world. Marco equates this legendary figure with “a great lord who was called in their language Ung Khan, which simply means Great Lord.” He tells us that the Tartars chose as their leader “Chinghiz Khan, a man of great ability and wisdom, a gifted orator and a brilliant soldier.” Chinghiz unites the Tartars, then enters into a conflict with Prester John by requesting his daughter in marriage. A battle ensues, Prester John is defeated, and the expansion of the Tartars begins.

Marco presents a lineage of the rulers descended from Chinghiz leading to his patron Kublai, “greater and more powerful than any of the others.” Then he tells us about the culture of the horse nomads. They live in circular felt houses, moving with their herds and carrying their possessions on two-wheeled carts drawn by camels and oxen. He describes their family life, their religion, their food and drink, their manner of dress, their military tactics, and their property laws.

Perhaps Rustichello thought he was losing his audience with all these facts, so he inserts a digression to be more entertaining. “Here is another strange custom which I had forgotten to describe.” He adds a tale of posthumously marrying dead children to assure their happiness in the next life. Both his European audience and these foreigners hunted with falcons, so he describes a region to the far north where the best peregrine falcons are bred. At which point, he ends the background briefing, returns to Kan-chau, the city where the Polos spent their lost year, and starts out again on the journey to the court of Kublai Khan.

The Franciscans missionaries from this period provide much more details about Mongol culture. The Persian historians Juvaini and Rashid al-Din provide a more comprehensive description of the lineage of the Mongol rulers, princes and military commanders. They were both officials in the Mongol government with access to all the records of the Empire, including records available only to members of the ruling families. Marco Polo may have worked for Kublai Khan but, unlike the Persians, he was not commanded by his patron to write a history of the Mongol conquests. The history Marco gives us is a condensed version synthesized from stories that he heard.

While he gets some details wrong, what he tells us is essentially correct. The people he describes are recognizably medieval horse nomads. Written and oral traditions suggest that the Mongol tribes migrated from the Siberian taiga regions onto the steppe lands of present-day Mongolia, and this migration is supported by contemporary archeology. The battle between Chinghiz Khan and Prester John is a cliché of courtly romance, Rustichello’s way of making the story interesting. Prester John is understood today as a European fantasy, but the relationship and conflict between the man who initiated the Mongol expansion and the man Marco Polo identifies with the mythical king is confirmed by other sources. The Marco Polo-Rustichello version is a screenplay rewrite of events that actually took place.

Depiction of Wang Khan in “Le Livre des merveilles,” 15th century.
PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

Beneath the facade of medieval romance are the essential historical facts. In The Secret History of the Mongols, the Mongol’s own version of their history written several generations before Marco Polo’s time in Asia, we learn that the Kerait leader Toghrul was given the title Wang (Ung) Khan for his service to the northern Chinese kingdom. Toghrul and the younger Temujin – a Mongol leader later given the title Chinggis (Genghis) Khan – fought together against the Tatar, a tribe responsible for murdering Chinggis Khan’s father. That Toghrul and the rest of the Kerait leadership were Nestorian Christians provides a reasonable justification for associating him with the well-known legend of Prester John. Chinggis Khan pledged his loyalty to the Kerait leader in an arrangement similar to a medieval European knight pledging loyalty to his king. This alliance led to a power struggle involving an offer of marriage to Wang Khan’s daughter. The final battle in which Chinggis Khan defeated the Kerait army was an important moment in his early career. After the battle, the Kerait people were incorporated into the Mongol political and military structure, along with many other formerly independent groups. And we can see that this story, rather than being a misconception, may have been an example of Marco’s Venetian shrewdness, choosing the conflict for Rusticello to transform into a romance that would be the most understandable for his European audience.

Much of the criticism of Marco Polo’s book focuses on what it omits. When we consider that his book offers the reader a description of the enormous world connecting the Black Sea coast to Korea, the caravan routes connecting Armenia and Persia to China, reports of the islands of Japan, the mountains of Tibet, the cities and provinces of China itself and the sea routes linking the kingdoms of Southeast Asia, the archipelago of Indonesia and the trading ports of East Africa and Arabia, there is plenty of opportunity to leave out any number of specific things.

So let us imagine a more perfect Book of Marco Polo, a manuscript that will be discovered in the future, written in the very un-literary Venetian dialect that was our adventurer/explorer/hero’s mother tongue. This would be the ur-text that all these other French, Franco-Italian, Tuscan, Latin, German and even Irish versions are based on.

So let us imagine a more perfect Book of Marco Polo, a manuscript that will be discovered in the future, written in the very un-literary Venetian dialect that was our adventurer/explorer/hero’s mother tongue. This would be the ur-text that all these other French, Franco-Italian, Tuscan, Latin, German and even Irish versions are based on.

In this manuscript all the problems raised by scholars and biographers over the centuries are solved. In this version Marco did learn Chinese and is well versed in Chinese history. He explains that the kingdom he lived in, formed by Kublai Khan’s war of conquest against the Song Dynasty, was the newly unified state incorporating a vast area that for the four hundred years following the dissolution of Tang China had been several separate countries. He explains that the northern kingdom already under Mongol rule when he arrived, where Kublai receives the Polos, was formed two centuries before by the Khitai, and that is why he calls the country Cathay. Both this northern region and the southern kingdom which he calls Mangi, along with the country of the Tanghut in the west and Tibet in the south will later be known as China. After carefully explaining this, Marco Polo warns later generations of European geographers not to confuse one for the other or all of them for the same thing.

He assists those of us attempting to trace his route from Venice to Cathay and back again on a contemporary map by admitting that he is not very precise in recalling the time it took to travel from one place to the next, at which point he carefully records the exact distance between each place he mentions. Then he points out the obvious: that the organization of the cities in his book has nothing to do with any specific journey. It is simply a way of describing the world he has seen.

He warns the sea captains of the future. “Consider how poorly the people of our time understand the extent of Asia and Africa,” he tells them. “Therefore you should not take your own explanations of what you have never seen too seriously.” He tells them that the world he describes is far greater than any we could imagine. He puts in writing the deathbed statement often attributed to him in legend: “In selecting material for my book I have not told half of what I saw.”

He adds a prophecy before closing this version of The Book: “In a dream I saw the word America written on a map. It is a name for the delusions of future mariners looking for the world I reached by land.” He conveys his hope that some readers of his book in the centuries to come will appreciate learning this from an ancient source.

A thousand years from now, this lost manuscript will be found in a vault. Beside it will be a yellowed paperback copy of Italo Calvino’s great prose poem, Invisible Cities translated into English. The acid-laced paper it is printed on will have all but disintegrated. For those few who can read ancient languages, this one passage remains: