Marco Polo
Venetian traveller Marco Polo (c. 1254-1324) famously travelled with his father and uncle to China, travelling east from Persia via Mosul, Baghdad, the Pamirs, Kashgar, and across the Gobi desert. After the trio arrived, Kublai Khan recruited him as an adviser and envoy for the Mongol court.
He travelled widely in the East, to destinations including Yunnan, northern Burma, Karakorum, Cochin-China, and southern India, and served as a regional governor between 1271 and 1295, when he returned to Venice via a maritime route that took them through Southeast Asia. Only eighteen of the six hundred travellers who left China to escort Cocacin, a Mongol princess, to Persia to marry the widowed Arghun Khan reached their destination.
Although his account of his travels as told to Rusticello in a Genoese prison after he was captured in the battle of Cuzola (7 September 1298) was initially disbelieved when it appeared in 1301, it was translated into Latin and most European vernacular languages before a printed edition appeared in 1477. Subsequently, it has appeared in more than one hundred and sixty print editions.
While he was not the first European traveller to reach China, Marco Polo was the first to produce a widely circulated account of his experiences that gave considerable impetus to European attempts to reach the Far East. Despite some of the oddities he describes, his account is the product of a merchant’s eye, combining factual information and marvels possibly added by Rusticello, who seems to have had an eye for a popular audience.
After his release from captivity in August 1299, he returned to Venice, where his father and uncle had purchased a large palazzo near the Rialto Bridge. While he and his uncle Maffeo financed other expeditions and trading ventures, it seems the man who has been described as the world's greatest traveller probably spent the rest of his lifewithout leaving Venetian territory.
