Marco Polo: the Merchant Who Mapped the World

By CountryReports.org

Marco Polo stands among the most remarkable travelers and narrators in the history of the world. Born in Venice around 1254, he embarked as a young man on a journey to the court of Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor who ruled China and vast stretches of Asia, and remained in the East for seventeen years, serving the Khan, witnessing the wonders of civilizations that most Europeans would never see, and gathering the material for a narrative that would shape European understanding of the world for centuries. His account, known variously as The Travels of Marco Polo, The Description of the World, or Il Milione, was the most widely read travel narrative of the Middle Ages, and its influence on geography, commerce, and the imagination of exploration was incalculable.

The question of how much Marco Polo actually saw, and how accurately he reported what he saw, has generated controversy for centuries. Medieval scholars and modern academics alike have questioned specific claims in his narrative, and some have gone so far as to suggest that he never reached China at all. But the weight of the evidence supports the conclusion that he was indeed in the East for many years, that his account, however embellished in particular details, preserves a substantial body of genuine observation, and that his contribution to European knowledge of Asia was transformative regardless of the precise accuracy of every individual claim.

To understand Marco Polo is to understand the world of the late thirteenth century: a world in which the Pax Mongolica had briefly opened trade routes across Asia that were normally closed by political fragmentation and military danger, in which Venice was the most commercially sophisticated city in Europe and the center of Mediterranean trade, and in which the horizon of geographical knowledge was beginning to expand in ways that would eventually lead to the age of exploration and the transformation of the world.

Venice in the Age of Polo

Venice in the mid-thirteenth century was the most remarkable city in Europe. Built on a series of islands in the shallow waters of the Adriatic, connected by bridges and navigated by canals, it was a city of water whose entire orientation was commercial and maritime. The Venetians had no agricultural hinterland worth speaking of, no natural resources beyond salt and fish, and no military strength on land that could compete with the great powers of the mainland. What they had was the sea and an extraordinary capacity for commerce, banking, and diplomacy.

The city had grown wealthy through the systematic development of maritime trade across the Mediterranean and, increasingly, beyond it. Venetian merchants had established trading colonies in Constantinople, in the Levant, and in the Black Sea ports that gave access to the land routes across Central Asia. They dealt in silk, spices, precious stones, gold, silver, and the hundred other commodities that flowed through the commercial arteries of the medieval world. They had developed sophisticated instruments of commercial law and finance -- bills of exchange, marine insurance, double-entry bookkeeping -- that gave them advantages over less commercially evolved competitors.