The Travels of Marco Polo

"Marco Polo’s dates are 1254 to 1324. He’s an Italian merchant. He travels astonishingly widely with his father and his uncle through the Mongol Empire and to China under the Yuan Dynasty, and according to the text he becomes an emissary for the Kublai Khan. “Marco Polo—and presumably also the contemporary readership, because it was so popular—seems to be driven very often just by a sense that he’s interested in stuff” I chose it partly because it’s really fun to read. Part of the debate about what this text actually is and the extent to which it genuinely reflects his travels arises from the sense that it’s such a joy to read. It reads a lot more like a medieval romance at times than a practical merchant manual for how you conduct travels along the Silk Roads . For better or for worse, it makes a very good read and it’s extremely fun. It’s also intriguing in the way it reveals just how interconnected this world is. It’s so tempting to think that the world opens up to Europeans in the late 16th and into the 17th centuries, but what you find from reading this is a world where people are highly aware of being part of a very intricate set of extremely extensive networks from a much earlier period, and that the trade which is going on is sophisticated and intensive as well. The third reason that I love this book is just the sense of curiosity that drives it. Marco Polo—and presumably also the contemporary readership, because it was so popular—seems to be driven very often just by a sense that he’s interested in stuff. He gets sent off on missions by the Kublai Khan in the Travels ; he’s sending him off to find out about some remote region just because he wants to know about it. I just love their sense of curiosity-driven travel and almost anthropological sense of why one wants to encounter peoples in different areas, and find out about what animals are like in different places and so on. As far as we know, it’s trade. He comes from a merchant family. They’re trading and trying to develop these commercial ties. But he gets picked up by the Mongol court, partly because he seems to be a rather charismatic sort of figure and somebody who is also really adept at picking up different languages. There are comments scattered throughout the text—obviously slightly less than trustworthy—by the Kublai Khan about how he would far rather have Marco Polo going off during these missions for him, because he’s so good at gathering information and knows how to ask the right kind of questions. He doesn’t just stick to the original brief that he’s given. You really do have a sense of someone whose personality took him beyond the bounds of his initial task. Yes, exactly. One of the interesting things about The Travels of Marco Polo is how the book quickly becomes so popular. That indicates not only that there were a lot of armchair travellers out there, but also that people genuinely wanted to know for very practical reasons what they might encounter in the Mongol world. The papacy is partly interested because of its interest in missionary activity in this period. The Dominicans in particular want to convert people. But there are increasing concerns about the Islamic world and there’s a tentative sense that an alliance with the Mongols might be a useful way of responding to the rise of Islam. He did get home, but the book doesn’t recount his homecoming. The book’s actually written when he’s in prison, and the story of the book is that he’s been telling these tales to his cell mate, Rustichello da Pisa, who writes them up. Again, that’s part of the reason that people aren’t quite sure what’s going on in terms of the authenticity of the text, because Rustichello da Pisa was known for writing various other romances. My favourite episode in the Tr avels is a passage where he describes an amazing creature that he’s encountered, which is a kind of unicorn. He describes it and he says, I’m paraphrasing here, ‘It’s not at all like the unicorns that we find in Europe because it’s really ugly and it’s kind of a brown-grey colour and it’s really hairy and it wallows in mud and its really really fierce.’ The description carries on like this and, of course, it’s the rhinoceros he’s describing. But what’s really intriguing is that in the illuminated manuscript copies of this, where the illuminators have been asked to depict what he’s describing, they invariably paint a pearly white unicorn alongside this description. There’s this lovely sense of curiosity-driven travel and people wanting to hear about these things but, at the same time, the only ways in which they’re prepared to conceptualize them is within their familiar categories. Yes, exactly. It’s a really interesting question. I have a sense that the text oscillates in a way. There are some passages where there’s this almost Orientalist sense of exoticizing what he finds, pandering to the armchair travellers who want to hear about very strange and fantastical things. But at the same time, there’s also a sense of the familiar, a sense that Marco Polo understands how political machinations work and how he needs to take care in these kinds of environments. And that kind of manoeuvring feels familiar. Yes, but I think there’s a sense as well that whilst this is very different kind of environment, at the same time, the ways in which you work as a political operator are familiar in a European court."