Marco Polo Departs Venice

In 1271, a young Venetian named Marco Polo set out from Venice with his father Niccolò and his uncle Maffeo on an overland journey toward the court of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. The trip, and the book that later came out of it, gave Europeans one of their most detailed pictures of Asia. The "24-year" span in the summary refers to the whole absence, since the Polos did not return to Venice until about 1295.

The journey had a backstory. Niccolò and Maffeo were merchants who had traded around the Black Sea and traveled farther east, eventually reaching Kublai Khan's court in the 1260s. According to Marco's account, the khan asked them to carry a message to the pope requesting Christian teachers and scholars. When the brothers came back to Europe, the papacy was in a long vacancy, and they set off again with Marco, then about seventeen. The Mongol conquests had by then created a vast zone of relative stability across Eurasia, sometimes called the Pax Mongolica, which made such long-distance travel more feasible than before.

The route is known only in outline. The party is generally thought to have passed through the eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia, then through Persia, and onward through Central Asia along the Silk Road, taking years to reach Kublai's court. Marco says he entered the khan's service and traveled widely on his missions across China and neighboring regions. The Polos eventually left, reportedly escorting a Mongol princess to Persia by sea, and then made their way home.

Marco's story survives because of a later accident of fate. Taken prisoner in a conflict between Venice and Genoa, he dictated his memories to a fellow prisoner, Rustichello of Pisa, a writer of romances. The resulting work, commonly known as The Travels of Marco Polo or Il Milione, circulated widely in manuscript. It described cities, goods, paper money, postal systems, and customs that many readers found hard to believe.

Historians still debate how much Marco saw firsthand. Skeptics note that his text omits things like the Great Wall and tea, and that it does not appear in Chinese records. Defenders point to the accuracy of much of his detail about trade, geography, and administration, and argue that some information likely came from other travelers and merchants. Most scholars accept that he did travel in Asia while recognizing that his book mixes observation with hearsay.

Whatever its flaws, the book shaped European geography. Its descriptions influenced mapmakers and later explorers, and Christopher Columbus is known to have owned and annotated a copy. Marco Polo's journey did not open the route between East and West, but his account helped make Asia feel real and reachable to Europeans.