In the spring of 1295 a Venetian merchant galley fought its way through a small naval engagement in the waters off the island of Curzola, on the Dalmatian coast, and was taken by the Genoese. Among the prisoners carried off to the Ligurian republic was a middle-aged man in his early forties who gave his name as Marco Polo, of the parish of San Giovanni Crisostomo, in Venice, returning from a long absence in the east. He was, in his own words and in the words of his Genoese captors, a noble of Venice and a merchant who had travelled further east than any of his countrymen, and possibly further than any European then living. He was to spend the next three years in a Genoese prison, and during that time he would dictate, in the lingua franca of the prison, the book that would make him the most famous traveller of the medieval world.
What the book says is, in many respects, more remarkable than the journey. Marco Polo claimed to have spent seventeen years at the court of the great khan of the Mongols, to have served as an inspector and a provincial official in several of the Khan’s provinces, to have travelled through the southern provinces of the Mongol Empire from Yunnan to Fuzhou, and to have made a long return voyage by sea from the Chinese port of Quanzhou to the Persian Gulf, accompanied by a Mongol princess who was to become the consort of the Ilkhan. The book is a description of the empire he claimed to have served and the route he claimed to have travelled, and it is the first extended European account of China, of the Indian Ocean, of the Spice Islands, of the court of the Mongol khans, and of the trade routes of the Mongol peace. It was copied and re-copied in manuscript for two hundred years before the first printed edition of 1477, was translated into every European language, and was one of the texts that Christopher Columbus carried with him on his first Atlantic voyage in 1492.
It has also been doubted, more thoroughly than almost any other book of the medieval period, that Marco Polo ever went to China at all. The doubts are old. In the seventeenth century the editors of the Ramusio collection noted that Marco Polo’s account of China was strangely silent on certain matters — on the Great Wall, on the binding of feet, on tea drinking, on Chinese writing — that any European visitor to the Yuan court would surely have remarked. In the nineteenth century the German sinologist Friedrich Hirth, comparing the book with contemporary Chinese sources, concluded that the geography was too vague to have been written from direct observation. In 1996 a British historian, Frances Wood, published a short, polemical book entitled “Did Marco Polo Go to China?” arguing that Marco Polo had never travelled further east than the Black Sea, and that the book that bore his name was assembled from a Persian source-text that the Polo family had access to in Constantinople, the Crimea, and the trading colonies of the Mongol Ilkhanate in Persia. The thesis is now taken seriously by no one, but the questions it raised — how much of the book is first-hand, how much is borrowed, how much is invention — have not gone away. Marco Polo’s China remains the most thoroughly examined, and the most thoroughly questioned, travel account in European history.
The Polos and the Mongol Peace
Marco Polo’s father, Niccolò, and his uncle, Maffeo, were members of a small Venetian merchant diaspora that had, by the middle of the thirteenth century, established trading houses in Constantinople, in the Crimea, in Soldaia (modern Sudak) on the coast of the Black Sea, and in the great emporia of the Mongol Ilkhanate in Persia. The Mongol Empire of the thirteenth century, founded by Genghis Khan in 1206 and consolidated by his sons and grandsons, was by the 1260s the largest contiguous land empire in the history of the world. It extended from the Pacific to the Black Sea, from the Arctic to the Persian Gulf, and from Korea to the western marches of Hungary. The Mongol khans had, by a mixture of conquest and diplomacy, made the overland trade routes of Asia safer than they had been for a thousand years, and they were encouraging the merchants of the Islamic world, of Christendom, and of the various Chinese successor states to travel within the empire. The Polos were among the first Italian merchants to take advantage of the new conditions.
They were not the first. The brothers’ first recorded journey east, between 1260 and 1269, had been made in the company of a small caravan that included several other Latin merchants. The brothers left Constantinople, sailed to Soldaia, travelled overland to the court of Barka Khan, the Mongol khan of the Golden Horde, at Sarai on the lower Volga, and then turned south-east, through Central Asia, to Bukhara. From Bukhara, in accordance with an invitation that had been extended by the Ilkhan Hulagu, they crossed the Oxus to the Ilkhanate and reached the Ilkhan’s capital at Tabriz. The Ilkhan received them graciously. From Tabriz, after a stay of some months, they were dispatched to the east with Mongol envoys, and reached the court of Kublai Khan at the summer palace of Shangdu, in the grasslands of what is now Inner Mongolia, in about 1265 or 1266. Kublai was, at that date, the senior of the four Mongol khanates and the de facto ruler of the whole of the empire, although the theoretical primacy of the line of Genghis Khan had been disrupted by the death of the last Great Khan, Möngke, in 1259. The brothers were received with curiosity, asked many questions about the political arrangements of the Latin states of the Levant, and given letters to the Pope.
The brothers returned to Acre in 1269 with the letters and with a Mongol envoy in attendance, and they found that the Pope they had been instructed to address, Clement IV, had died. The Polos waited two years in Venice for a new Pope to be elected, and the envoys, who had been instructed to return within a year, lost patience and went home. When the brothers at last received letters from the new Pope, Gregory X, the Pope entrusted the letters to two Dominicans, who set out with the brothers in 1271. The Dominicans turned back at the first sign of danger, in Armenia, but the Polos continued. They reached Acre, then the court of the Ilkhan at Tabriz, then the court of the khan of the Golden Horde, then Bukhara, and after a delay of some three years in Bukhara they at last reached the court of Kublai Khan at Shangdu in 1275.
They brought with them, in addition to the Pope’s letters, the young Marco Polo, who was then about seventeen years old. Marco had been born in Venice in 1254, in the year that his father had set out on the first of his eastern journeys, and had been raised by relatives in the parish of San Giovanni Crisostomo. The book that bears his name, dictated in the Genoese prison in 1298 and 1299, would later report that the young Marco had been accepted into the household of Kublai Khan, that the Khan had taken a personal interest in him, and that he had been sent on missions to the southern and western provinces of the empire. Whether this is plausible depends, in part, on the question of how old Marco was when the Polos returned to Venice in 1295 — and on the question of what the Khan thought he was getting from a Venetian teenager who had been brought up in a trading family.
The Yuan Court at Shangdu and Dadu
Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis, was by 1275 the most powerful ruler in the world. He had completed the conquest of southern China in 1276 and 1279, defeating the last of the Southern Song emperors and absorbing the wealthiest, most populous, and most economically advanced region of the world into his empire. He had moved the Mongol capital from Karakorum, in the central Mongolian grasslands, first to Shangdu, the summer palace in Inner Mongolia that the Polos had visited, and then to Dadu, the new imperial city that he had built in 1267 on the site of what is now central Beijing, with the secondary capital of Zhongdu (the old Jin-dynasty capital) lying to its south-west as a kind of outer city. Dadu was, in the late thirteenth century, the largest planned city in the world, a regular grid of streets and canals modelled on the imperial Chinese capital of Chang’an, surrounded by a great wall, served by a complex system of granaries and imperial workshops, and with a permanent population that European observers estimated at more than a million and that Chinese sources put at considerably less but still in the hundreds of thousands.
The Mongol court at Dadu was, by the standards of any contemporary European or Islamic court, extraordinarily cosmopolitan. The Khitan, the Jurchen, the Uighur, the Tibetan, the Central Asian, the Persian, the Nestorian Christian, the Armenian, the Georgian, the Russian, the Alan, the Hungarian, the Bohemian, the French, the Italian, the Muslim, the Buddhist, the Confucian, the Taoist, the Daoist, the Hindu, and the Jewish communities of the empire all maintained representatives in the capital. The Khan’s own religious policy was deliberately syncretic: he employed Muslim astronomers, Tibetan lamas, Nestorian Christian clerks, and Chinese Confucian ritualists at his court, and he maintained a network of Buddhist, Taoist, Muslim, and Christian religious institutions across the empire. The Khorchi, the Mongol oral tradition, was supplemented by the establishment of an imperial school of translation that worked in five languages, the four main languages of the empire plus Latin, and produced a series of dictionaries and ritual texts for the use of the administration.
It was in this multilingual, multi-religious, multi-ethnic environment that the Polos lived, by Marco’s own account, for seventeen years. The question of what the young Marco was actually doing for those seventeen years has been the subject of more than seven hundred years of scholarly debate. The traditional reading, derived from the book itself, is that Marco was a kind of roving inspector, sent by the Khan to the southern and western provinces of the empire to report on conditions and on the conduct of the local officials. The book repeatedly refers to Marco as “il Milione” — “the Million” — and gives the title of “Messer Marco” in connection with several specific assignments. The skeptical reading, associated most closely with Frances Wood, is that the young Marco was no more than a junior merchant in a Venetian trading house, that the book is an extended piece of merchants’ intelligence, and that the references to the Khan’s special favour are later additions.
The truth is probably somewhere in between, and the recent consensus among Mongol historians, led by the work of Thomas Allsen, is that Marco was probably a member of the small foreign merchant community that was resident in Dadu in the 1280s and 1290s, that he was probably a competent enough speaker of one of the Turkic languages to be useful to the Khan’s administration, and that he was probably present at the Khan’s court in a semi-official capacity that combined commercial and intelligence-gathering functions. The specific references in the book to his being a provincial governor for three years in the city of Yangzhou, the main salt-monopoly port of the empire, are now generally taken to be exaggerated or misunderstood — the Mongol administration did indeed employ a number of foreign officials in the southern provinces, and a Marco Polo is recorded in a Chinese source as having been involved in the salt administration of Yangzhou in 1282 — but the precise nature of his role is not recoverable from the surviving evidence.
The Provinces of the Khan
What the book gives, in considerable detail, is an account of the geography, the customs, the products, and the political arrangements of the various provinces of the Mongol Empire. Marco travelled, by his own account, through the province of Cathay (northern China), the province of Mangi (southern China, the recently-conquered Song territory), the provinces of Yunnan, of Sichuan, of Shaanxi, of Gansu, of Tibet, of Burma, of Vietnam, of Korea, of the Mongol heartland, of Turkestan, of Persia, of Armenia, of Georgia, of the Ilkhanate, of Anatolia, of the Golden Horde, of Russia, of the Crimea, of Constantinople, and of the Aegean. The accounts are uneven. Some of them — the account of the city of Hangzhou, the account of the salt monopoly of Yangzhou, the account of the tea trade of Fujian, the account of the sugar industry of southern China, the account of the Silk Road caravans, the account of the horsemen of Mongolia, the account of the pearl fisheries of Sri Lanka, the account of the gold-mines of Afghanistan, the account of the indigo trade of Bengal, the account of the pepper trade of the Malabar Coast — are detailed, specific, and in many cases consistent with what we know from Chinese, Persian, and Arabic sources of the period. Others — the accounts of the interior of Africa south of the Sahara, of the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, of the southern polar regions, of the court of the Great Khan’s grandson at the southern tip of the Indian peninsula, and of the population of the island of Madagascar — are by Marco’s own admission second-hand.
The book contains, in the chapter on the city of Hangzhou, the most detailed first-hand European account of a Chinese city that had been written up to that date, and one of the most detailed that would be written for the next three centuries. The account is full of specifics: the circumference of the city, the number of bridges, the number of baths, the markets, the silks, the porcelain, the trades, the Buddhist monasteries, the boats, the canals, the customs of the people. Most of the specifics are consistent with the account of the city given in the contemporary Chinese geographical gazetteer, the “Linchuan zhi,” and with the account of the city in the diary of the Italian Franciscan missionary John of Montecorvino, who visited Hangzhou in the 1290s. The book also gives, in the chapter on the city of Quanzhou, an account of the principal Chinese port of the South China Sea that is similarly detailed: the harbour, the foreign merchants, the customs house, the inns, the Buddhist monasteries, the mosques of the Muslim community, the trading colony of the Republic of Venice.
The chapters on the Mongol heartland — on the grassland capital of Karakorum, on the summer palace of Shangdu, on the new capital of Dadu, on the great khan’s court, on the postal relay system of the Yam, on the official receptions, on the imperial hunts, on the great Naadam festival of the summer — are the most original in the book. The postal relay system, in particular, was a topic that no previous European traveller had described in detail, and Marco’s account of the system of stations, the horses, the couriers, the provisions, the inscriptions, the road-tolls, and the regulations of the Yam was the first European description of any imperial postal system in the world. The Chinese, Persian, and Arabic travellers who had previously described the system had not done so with this level of structural detail.
The Book and Rustichello
Marco Polo was released from the Genoese prison in 1299, after a peace had been arranged between Genoa and Venice. He returned to Venice, took up the management of the family property, married, and fathered three daughters. He was a wealthy man for the rest of his life, although the rest of his life was not long. He died in 1324, in his early seventies, and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Venice. The book that bears his name, however, was not finished when he left the Genoese prison. It was being written up, in the lingua franca of the prison, by a Pisan romance-writer named Rustichello of Pisa, who had been imprisoned at the same time and who recognised the commercial and literary value of Marco’s account. Rustichello was a competent writer, the author of a number of Arthurian romances in the French of the period, and the book is in many ways as much his composition as Marco’s.
The book survives in about a hundred and fifty manuscripts, in four main recensions. The oldest and most reliable is the so-called “F” text, the French of the original dictated version, which is preserved in a manuscript of about 1310 in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. The next most reliable is the “Z” text, an Italian version that was probably produced for the Florentine market, and which incorporates a number of additions and corrections that were probably made in Marco’s lifetime. The two later recensions, the “V” Latin version and the “P” Portuguese version, are of lower textual quality and contain more additions and interpolations. The English translations are mostly based on the “Y” version, a Latin translation that was made for the English market in the late fourteenth century, and which is the version that became the basis of the printed editions from 1477 onwards. The standard modern critical edition, edited by Luigi Foscolo Benedetto and corrected by a long series of subsequent sinologists and Romance philologists, was published in 1928 and remains the reference work for the text.
The book’s original title was “Description of the World,” or “Book of the Marvels of the World.” The title by which it is now commonly known, “The Travels of Marco Polo,” is a later convention. The book is divided into four parts: an account of the Polos’ outward journey from Venice to Shangdu; an account of the provinces of the Mongol Empire as Marco claimed to know them; an account of the route from the Mongol Empire to the sea; and an account of the Indian Ocean and the countries to the south and south-east of the Mongol Empire. The book is not, in any modern sense, a narrative of personal experience. It is a compendium of geographical, ethnographical, and economic information about the Mongol Empire, drawn partly from Marco’s own observation and partly from the reports of merchants, missionaries, and other travellers that Marco had met during his seventeen years in the east.
The Return by Sea
What is sometimes described as the Polos’ “return by sea” was, in the terms of the book, a long voyage that began in the port of Quanzhou in about 1292 and ended in the port of Venice in 1295. The principal passengers were three Mongol envoys who were being sent by Kublai Khan to the court of the Ilkhan of Persia, the great-grandson of Genghis Khan who ruled the western part of the empire from Tabriz. The Ilkhan was nominally a tributary of the Great Khan, but the practical ties between the two courts had frayed over the previous generation, and the Polos were entrusted with the diplomatic mission of accompanying the envoys and of delivering a Mongol princess of the lineage of Genghis, Cocachin by name, to the Ilkhan’s court for marriage. The diplomatic mission was a real one. The book gives a detailed account of the negotiations, the preparations, the route, the stops, the gifts, and the ceremonial that accompanied the mission.
The voyage took the fleet of fourteen junks and several smaller boats from Quanzhou down the Chinese coast to the South China Sea, across the South China Sea to the ports of Champa, to the Sumatran ports of Semudera and Perlak, to the Strait of Malacca, to the Nicobar Islands, to the coast of Sri Lanka, to the south Indian port of Calicut on the Malabar Coast, to the Persian Gulf, and to the port of Hormuz. The Ilkhan’s court was not at Hormuz, however, but further north at Tabriz, and the envoys travelled the overland route from Hormuz through Kerman to Tabriz. The Polos stayed with the envoys, and at Tabriz they received news of the death of Kublai Khan (which had occurred in 1294) and of the succession of his grandson, the Khan Temür. The news, combined with the long sea voyage and the need to return to Venice to settle the family property, prompted the Polos to take a westward overland route from Tabriz to Trabzon on the Black Sea, and from Trabzon by sea to Constantinople, and from Constantinople by the established sea-lanes of the Aegean and the Adriatic to Venice. They reached Venice in 1295, after an absence of twenty-four years.
The route of the return voyage is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the book’s first-hand character. The descriptions of the South-east Asian ports, of the Sumatran ports, of the Strait of Malacca, of the Nicobar Islands, of the south Indian ports, of the Persian Gulf, of Hormuz, of the overland route through Kerman, of the court at Tabriz, of the route through Trabzon, and of Constantinople are all detailed, specific, and consistent with what we know from contemporary Chinese, Arab, Persian, and Byzantine sources. Some of the details — the description of the Sulu archipelago, the description of the pearl fisheries of the Strait of Manaar, the description of the horse trade of Hormuz, the description of the Indian Ocean monsoon, the description of the ceremonial of the Ilkhan’s court — are strikingly original. The book is, in many ways, as much a book about the Indian Ocean trade of the late thirteenth century as it is a book about China.
The Book and Its Readers
For the first century after its composition, the book circulated mainly in Italian, French, and Latin manuscript. The first printed edition, in Latin, was published in Antwerp or Nuremberg in 1477. The first printed Italian edition was published in Venice in 1496. The book was translated into all the major European languages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and by the eighteenth century it was one of the most widely read works of travel in any European language. The book was used as a practical guide by the Portuguese and Spanish navigators of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: Christopher Columbus carried a copy of the book with him on his first voyage, and the book is one of the texts that he annotated. The book was used as a model by a long series of late medieval and early modern travel-writers, including the author of “Sir John Mandeville’s Travels,” who borrowed from it extensively. The book was also used, from the sixteenth century onwards, as a source of evidence about the political and economic arrangements of the Mongol Empire, and it was a major text in the European understanding of Central and East Asian geography until the eighteenth century.
The book’s influence on the European understanding of China was particularly large. The book was the principal source for the European idea of Cathay (the name by which northern China was known in Europe from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries) for nearly three hundred years. The book’s account of the Khan’s administration, of the postal relay system, of the granaries, of the great river of Cambaluc (the Yongding, on which Dadu stood), of the paper currency, of the coal mines, of the silk industry, of the porcelain of Jingdezhen, of the tea trade, of the southern provinces, and of the great port cities of the south was, for the early modern European reader, the most detailed picture of China that existed. The book’s influence is visible in the works of a number of sixteenth and seventeenth century European writers on China, including Matteo Ricci’s account of the Ming court, Jan Huyghen van Linschoten’s account of the Portuguese trade with China, and the various seventeenth and eighteenth century Jesuit accounts of the Kangxi court.
What the book does not contain has been the subject of even more discussion than what it does contain. The book does not mention the Great Wall of China. The book does not mention Chinese writing, the Chinese character script, the Chinese language, the Chinese literary tradition, or the Chinese book. The book does not mention the binding of feet. The book does not mention tea drinking. The book does not mention chopsticks. The book does not mention the Chinese examination system. The book does not mention the Chinese practice of ancestor worship, the Chinese Buddhist monastic tradition, or the Chinese Taoist tradition in any detail. The book does not mention, except in passing, the city of Guangzhou, the province of Hunan, the province of Jiangxi, or the Yangtze gorges. The book’s account of the southern provinces is much less detailed than its account of the northern provinces and the Mongol heartland. The book is, in short, the account of a foreign merchant at a Mongol court, and it should be read as such.
What We Can Know About Marco Polo’s China
The most productive recent work on the book has been the work of the Mongol historians, and in particular the work of Thomas Allsen, Igor de Rachewiltz, and the late John Masson Smith, who have compared the book systematically with the surviving Chinese, Persian, and Arabic sources of the period. The conclusion of this work is that the book is a substantially first-hand account, but that it is also a heavily edited, heavily supplemented, and heavily compressed account. The first-hand material includes the descriptions of Dadu, of Shangdu, of the Mongol court, of the postal relay system, of the salt administration, of the paper currency, of the granaries, of the silk industry, of the tea trade, of the port of Quanzhou, of the city of Hangzhou, of the Indian Ocean route, and of the various provinces that the book describes. The supplemented material includes the descriptions of provinces and peoples that Marco is unlikely to have visited in person. The compressed material includes the account of the journey from Venice to Shangdu, which in the book occupies only a few chapters and which in real time took more than three years.
The book’s silence on certain matters can be explained by a number of factors, none of which requires the conclusion that Marco never went to China. The book is, in the first place, not a book about China. It is a book about the Mongol Empire, and within the Mongol Empire the principal Chinese province that Marco is recorded as having been involved in is the province of Yangzhou, the salt-monopoly port on the Yangtze. The book’s silence on the Great Wall can be explained by the fact that the Great Wall was not, in the late thirteenth century, the structure it would become in the late Ming. The wall-building project of the late Ming, which produced the great masonry walls that we now associate with the Great Wall, had not yet begun. The walls of the Yuan period were, in the regions that Marco is recorded as having passed through, principally the old rammed-earth walls of the Jin and Song periods, which were of a different character and which would not have been the subject of a European traveller’s remark. The book’s silence on Chinese writing can be explained by the fact that the book is not a book about the Chinese language. The book’s account of the Chinese system of paper currency is, in fact, detailed and accurate, and the book does refer to the Khan’s use of Chinese for the inscription of edicts and the keeping of records.
What the book gives, in the end, is not a complete picture of Yuan China, but a partial, foreign, and highly selective picture of the Mongol Empire as seen from the court of Dadu. The book is the account of a foreign merchant who lived in the Mongol capital for seventeen years, who was a competent enough speaker of one of the Turkic languages to be useful to the Khan’s administration, and who had a particular interest in the commercial and administrative arrangements of the empire. The book is not the account of a Chinese-speaker, a Confucian scholar, a Buddhist monk, a Taoist priest, or a Chinese official. It is the account of a Latin Christian merchant who served, in some capacity, at the court of the great khan. That it is the first such account, and that it remained for three centuries the most detailed such account available to European readers, is why it remains one of the most important books of the medieval world.
Marco Polo’s China was, in many ways, a vanished China. The Yuan dynasty was overthrown in 1368 by the Ming, and the Mongol court retired to the steppe. The Mongol postal relay system was dismantled. The salt administration of Yangzhou was reformed. The city of Shangdu was destroyed. The city of Dadu was renamed Beiping and reduced to a regional capital. The Indian Ocean trade of the late Yuan period was disrupted by the contraction of the Chinese maritime presence. The Muslim communities of the southern Chinese ports were assimilated or dispersed. The book survived, in manuscript, in the libraries of Europe. It is, in the long view, one of the principal records of the Mongol Empire that we possess, and one of the principal records of the China of the late Yuan period that any European writer produced. That it was written by a Genoese prisoner, in a lingua franca prison, in the early years of the fourteenth century, is part of what makes it remarkable.
