Background
The Polo family were Venetian merchants of the upper-bourgeois rank. Marco’s father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo Polo had already made one trans-Eurasian journey to the court of Kublai Khan in the 1260s, returning to Venice in 1269 with a letter from the Khan to the Pope requesting Christian teachers and oil from the Lamp of the Holy Sepulchre. Marco was 15 when his father returned and met him for the first time. The two brothers prepared a second journey in 1271, bringing the 17-year-old Marco with them.
The political context for the journey was the Pax Mongolica — the period of secure trans-Eurasian travel between approximately 1240 and 1340 produced by the Mongol Empire’s territorial unification of Asia. The route from the eastern Mediterranean to China was open to European merchants for the only sustained period before the modern era.
The journey east
The Polos sailed from Venice in 1271 with two Dominican friars provided by Pope Gregory X. The friars turned back at Armenia. The Polos continued through Anatolia, the Caucasus, Persia, the Pamir Mountains, the Taklamakan Desert, and the Hexi Corridor — a journey of approximately three and a half years and 9,000 kilometres. They reached Kublai Khan’s summer capital at Shangdu (the Xanadu of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1816 poem, in modern Inner Mongolia) in 1275.
At the Mongol court
Kublai Khan was the grandson of Genghis Khan and the founder of the Yuan dynasty that ruled Mongol-conquered China. He had moved his political capital to Khanbaliq (modern Beijing) in 1271 and was completing the conquest of the Southern Song. The Khan reportedly received the Polos warmly and took an active interest in Marco, who proved to have an unusual capacity for languages and political-cultural observation.
Marco served Kublai for approximately seventeen years in a variety of administrative and diplomatic roles. The exact positions are disputed — Marco’s own account claims he was governor of Yangzhou for three years, an ambassador to several southern Chinese provinces, and a regular member of the imperial court. Chinese administrative records do not confirm any of these specifics, though the absence is not strong evidence (the records do not generally list foreign administrators by their European names).
Marco’s account describes substantial portions of Yuan China — the imperial capital at Khanbaliq, the great cities of the Yangtze valley, the southern coast of China, Tibet, Burma, and northern Vietnam — in detail consistent with personal observation. He also describes parts of South and Southeast Asia (Java, Sumatra, Sri Lanka, southern India) that he visited on a final embassy that took him from China home to Europe by sea via Sumatra and Persia.
Return
The Polos left China around 1292 escorting a Mongol princess being sent west to marry the Khan of the Ilkhanate in Persia. They sailed from southern China through Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, reached the Persian Gulf two years later, delivered the princess (her intended bridegroom had died in the interval), and continued overland to Constantinople and Venice. They arrived home in 1295. Marco was 41.
The most famous anecdote about the return — preserved in 16th-century Venetian sources but absent from earlier records — has the three Polos returning in rough Mongol-style clothing, unrecognized by their family, and then producing the precious stones they had sewn into the linings as proof of their identity. Whether the story is true or post-hoc legend, it captures the cultural disorientation of three men returned from a 24-year absence.
The book
In 1298 Marco was captured by the Genoese during a naval battle between Venice and Genoa. He spent approximately a year in a Genoese prison, where he met Rustichello da Pisa, a writer of Arthurian romances. Marco dictated his Asian travels to Rustichello; the result — variously called Il Milione, Le Devisement du Monde, or The Travels of Marco Polo — circulated rapidly across Europe in Latin, French, Italian, German, English, and Spanish manuscript versions. Approximately 150 medieval manuscript copies survive.
The book is composed in two registers: factual administrative-geographical description (probably from Marco’s notebook material) and conventional medieval romance vocabulary (probably from Rustichello). The factual content is broadly accurate for the eastern Mediterranean, Persia, Central Asia, and China, but contains substantial errors and omissions. Most famously, it does not mention the Great Wall of China, tea, chopsticks, the Chinese script, or foot-binding — absences that have been used to argue that Marco never visited China at all. The more probable explanation is that Marco visited mostly Mongol-administered northern China, where these specifically Chinese practices were less visible.
Legacy
Marco’s Travels was the primary European source of information on Asia for the next three centuries. Christopher Columbus carried a heavily annotated copy on his 1492 voyage and was looking for the kingdoms Marco had described when he reached the Caribbean. The book’s circulation contributed substantially to the European cartographic improvements of the 14th and 15th centuries (the Catalan Atlas of 1375 is partly based on Marco) and to the European interest in finding direct maritime routes to East Asia that produced the age of exploration.
Marco died in Venice on 8 January 1324, aged 69, leaving a will that distributed his accumulated wealth among his family and charitable institutions. According to a tradition recorded in the 16th century, his deathbed visitors begged him to retract the more incredible elements of his book; he reportedly answered that he had not told them half of what he had seen.