Here, in a fascinating excerpt from his latest book - A Universe of Books - Peter Whitfield looks at Marco Polo’s intrepid travels that introduced the Western world to the delights of the East, way back in the 13th century...
What was the book which had the greatest influence on European history between say 1200 and 1600? Was it the great intellectual works of Aquinas or Dante, of Luther or Copernicus? In practical terms it may have been none of these, but the narrative of Marco Polo’s journey to China. By unveiling Chinese civilisation to Europe - its social magnificence, its technical inventiveness, its great cities and its fabulous wealth - Marco Polo’s text acted as a spur to the European age of discovery, and all the immense consequences for world history which flowed from it. When the navigators of the fifteenth century turned their eyes beyond the shores of Europe, they and their patrons were not seeking new lands: they were seeking new routes to lands already known by report and reputation, and the most important of these reports was Marco Polo’s description of Cathay - China. His eastern journey was one of the two or three most momentous events in the history of exploration, revealing to European eyes a vast region and a civilisation of which they had previously known nothing; it created the lure of the east as the fundamental motive for European explorers.
Marco’s journey took place between 1271 and 1295, and it was the fortuitous result of a complex set of political circumstances. An overland trade route between Europe and eastern Asia had existed since Roman times, bringing luxury goods such as silk, jewels and spices to the west - the famous Silk Road. In practice no one individual travelled the whole route, for goods passed through many hands in many stages - this is why there was no first-hand knowledge of China in the west. In the seventh century AD, the western sector of this route came under Moslem control, and travel in the region became all but impossible for Europeans. This situation was changed by the eruption of Mongol power in the thirteenth century, which attacked and severely weakened the Moslem states, and established a single imperial authority reaching from the Pacific coast to the Black Sea. Thus there existed from about 1250 onwards a unique opportunity for contact between east and west. Marco Polo’s family were Venetian jewel merchants, with long-established contacts in the Black Sea ports, who seized that opportunity.
In 1255 Marco’s father and uncle, Nicolo and Maffeo Polo set out on their first journey overland to and from east Asia, which occupied fourteen years, and took them to the very court of the Mongol emperor, Kublai Khan, in the city of Cambaluc, near the modern Beijing. Kublai Khan was an enlightened ruler, and was deeply interested in what the Polos told him of Europe, and he invited them to return with dispatches from the Pope. The course of this first journey is briefly recorded at the beginning of Marco’s text, for it prepared the way for their second, when they took the seventeen-year-old Marco with them. The route of the second journey was through Persia to Hormuz, with the intention of taking ship to India and beyond, but they changed their plans, and instead turned north-east to Afghanistan and across the Pamirs. They then skirted the edges of the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts, and arrived in Cambaluc three years after leaving Venice. They were to remain for seventeen years in the Mongol capital, and Marco travelled widely throughout Cathay in the service of the Khan. It was not unusual for foreigners to be employed in this way, for they were felt to be neutral, immune from the intrigues and treachery which might corrupt both Mongol and Chinese servants.
Marco Polo pictured in the first printed edition of his book, 1477 Marco’s narrative of his journey, and of this period of imperial service, established the geography and the character of Cathay: the formidable mountains and deserts which must be crossed to reach it; the great cities of Cambaluc and Quinsay, where gold and silk were traded in fabulous quantities; the sea-port of Zaiton, where huge fleets sailed for Champa (Vietnam), Malaya, Java and India; the eastern ocean, reputedly containing over 7,000 islands, the largest and most enticing of them Zipanga (Japan) whose wealth in jewels was inexhaustible; the savage inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, with heads like dogs, who ate everybody they could catch. Everything in Cathay was on a fabulous scale, so that Marco’s reputation for exaggeration became legendary. Any city must have thousands of bridges, any harbour must accommodate thousands of vessels, any palace must be home to thousands of men, and so on:
"I give you my word that I have seen in this city fully 5,000 ships at once, all afloat on this river… I assure you that the river flows through more than sixteen provinces and there are on its banks more than 200 cities, all having more ships than this.
"The interior of the Khan’s palace is gold and silver and decorated with pictures, the ceilings similarly adorned. No man could imagine any improvement in design and execution. The roof is all ablaze with scarlet and green and blue and yellow, and all the colours are so brilliantly varnished that it glitters like crystal… the sparkle can be seen from far away."
This style of writing aimed to satisfy the medieval taste for marvels, and it may explain why both Marco and his text became known as il Milione - the “million man”. But it has also, and more seriously, been used by some to argue that his descriptions are mere imagination, that he never visited China at all, but picked up the material for his colourful narrative from travellers in the Black Sea ports. These critics also point to some curious omissions in the text: despite spending seventeen years in China, Marco never mentions the Great Wall, the Chinese script, the technique of printing, or the habit of drinking tea. He does mention paper money, but apparently had no understanding of its significance, for he uses it to explain the Emperor’s fabulous wealth: he could simply create his own money. These doubts about the authenticity of his narrative have a long history, and there is a story that as he lay dying, Marco was urged to retract some of his fantasies, which he refused to do, adding that he had not described half of what he had seen.
In 1292 the Polo family finally left China, and made their way home, mainly by sea from Zaiton, in stages via the Indian coast to Hormuz. Marco had apparently no plans to write an account of his travels, but five years after his return he was imprisoned by the rival Genoese, and during his captivity he met a writer of romances and fables, a man named Rusticello, who suggested that his experiences would make an entertaining and original book. In time this book became probably the most popular secular works of the middle ages. Today almost 150 manuscripts are extant, suggesting that it may once have circulated in its thousands, before its first printing in 1477. There were versions in Italian, French, and Latin, and there are so many variations in the texts, that the book presents one of the most complex literary problems of the middle ages; there is no standard text or even a standard title. Although we usually refer to it as “The Travels of Marco Polo”, the original title was simply “Description of the World”.
Marco’s journey had little in the way of immediate sequel. Groups of missionaries made their way to China, but no new trade route was established in Marco’s footsteps. Marco himself died in 1324, and by 1350 Mongol power was crumbling, the Chinese withdrew once more into isolation, and the window which had opened between east and west was closed again. But the impact of Marco’s book was permanent. Perhaps its earlier readers saw it as a “marvel text”, without realising its full implications. But by the fifteenth century, as European maritime skills developed, the possibility of revisiting Cathay by sea was considered by geographical scholars and navigators; this would circumvent the Moslem-occupied Middle East. We know that Columbus studied Marco’s text minutely, and that he and many of the explorers who came after him sought to identify the lands which they found in the Americas and the Pacific with places in China described by him. When Columbus sailed west from Spain in 1492, it was Marco Polo’s Cathay that he was seeking, for the Venetian’s text was his principal inspiration. The breaking down of the isolation in which the world’s cultures had existed for centuries, began with Marco Polo’s book.
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Dr Peter Whitfield is the author of several books, including The Image of the World, The Mapping of the Heavens, The Charting of the Oceans, New Found Lands - Maps in the History of Exploration, Cities of the World: A History in Maps and London: A Life in Maps. His real claim to fame, however, is that during the 1980s he was a colleague of ours as director of Stanfords and wrote The Mapmakers - A History of Stanfords. For further information on Peter Whitfield, visit his website: www.wychwoodeditions.co.uk.
We stock The Travels by Marco Polo.
Author: Peter Whitfield
Date: 3 January 2008