Book of the Marvels of the World (Italian: Il Milione, lit. 'The Million', possibly derived from Polo's nickname "Emilione"),[1] in English commonly called The Travels of Marco Polo, is a 13th-century travelogue written down by Rustichello da Pisa from stories told by Italian explorer Marco Polo. It describes Polo's travels through Asia between 1271 and 1295, and his experiences at the court of Kublai Khan.[2][3]
The book was written by romance writer Rustichello da Pisa, who worked from accounts which he had heard from Marco Polo when they were imprisoned together in Genoa.[4] Rustichello wrote it in Franco-Venetian,[5][6][7] a literary language widespread in northern Italy between the subalpine belt and the lower Po between the 13th and 15th centuries.[8] It was originally known as Livre des Merveilles du Monde or Devisement du Monde ("Description of the World"). The book was translated into many European languages in Marco Polo's own lifetime, but the original manuscripts are now lost, and their reconstruction is a matter of textual criticism. A total of about 150 copies in various languages are known to exist, including in Old French,[9]Tuscan, two versions in Venetian, and two different versions in Latin.
From the beginning, there has been incredulity over Polo's sometimes fabulous stories, as well as a scholarly debate in recent times.[10] Some have questioned whether Marco had actually traveled to China or was just repeating stories that he had heard from other travelers.[11] Economic historian Mark Elvin concludes that recent work "demonstrates by specific example the ultimately overwhelming probability of the broad authenticity" of Polo's account, and that the book is, "in essence, authentic, and, when used with care, in broad terms to be trusted as a serious though obviously not always final, witness."[12]
History
The route Polo describes.The probable view of Marco Polo's own geography (drawn by Henry Yule, 1871).
The source of the title Il Milione is debated. One view is it comes from the Polo family's use of the name Emilione to distinguish themselves from the numerous other Venetian families bearing the name Polo.[13] A more common view is that the name refers to medieval reception of the travelog, namely that it was full of "a million" lies.[14]
Modern assessments of the text usually consider it to be the record of an observant rather than imaginative or analytical traveler. Marco Polo emerges as being curious and tolerant, and devoted to Kublai Khan and the dynasty that he served for two decades. The book is Polo's account of his travels to China, which he calls Cathay (north China) and Manji (south China). The Polo party left Venice in 1271. The journey took three years after which they arrived in Cathay as it was then called and met the grandson of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan. They left China in late 1290 or early 1291[15] and were back in Venice in 1295. The tradition is that Polo dictated the book to a romance writer, Rustichello da Pisa, while in prison in Genoa between 1298 and 1299. Rustichello may have worked up his first Franco-Italian version from Marco's notes. The book was then named Devisement du Monde and Livres des Merveilles du Monde in French, and De Mirabilibus Mundi in Latin.[16]
Role of Rustichello
The British scholar Ronald Latham has pointed out that The Book of Marvels was in fact a collaboration written in 1298–1299 between Polo and a professional writer of romances, Rustichello of Pisa.[17] It is believed that Polo related his memoirs orally to Rustichello da Pisa while both were prisoners of the Genova Republic. Rustichello wrote Devisement du Monde in the Franco-Venetian language.[18]
Latham also argued that Rustichello may have glamorised Polo's accounts, and added fantastic and romantic elements that made the book a bestseller.[17] The Italian scholar Luigi Foscolo Benedetto had previously demonstrated that the book was written in the same "leisurely, conversational style" that characterised Rustichello's other works, and that some passages in the book were taken verbatim or with minimal modifications from other writings by Rustichello. For example, the opening introduction in The Book of Marvels to "emperors and kings, dukes and marquises" was lifted straight out of an Arthurian romance Rustichello had written several years earlier, and the account of the second meeting between Polo and Kublai Khan at the latter's court is almost the same as that of the arrival of Tristan at the court of King Arthur at Camelot in that same book.[19] Latham believed that many elements of the book, such as legends of the Middle East and mentions of exotic marvels, may have been the work of Rustichello who was giving what medieval European readers expected to find in a travel book.[20]
Role of the Dominican Order
Apparently, from the very beginning Marco's story aroused contrasting reactions, as it was received by some with a certain disbelief. The Dominican fatherFrancesco Pipino[it] was the author of a translation into Latin, Iter Marci Pauli Veneti in 1302, just a few years after Marco's return to Venice.[21] Francesco Pipino solemnly affirmed the truthfulness of the book and defined Marco as a "prudent, honoured and faithful man".[22] In his writings, the Dominican brother Jacopo d'Acqui explains why his contemporaries were skeptical about the content of the book. He also relates that before dying, Marco Polo insisted that "he had told only a half of the things he had seen".[22]
According to some recent research of the Italian scholar Antonio Montefusco, the very close relationship that Marco Polo cultivated with members of the Dominican Order in Venice suggests that local fathers collaborated with him for a Latin version of the book, which means that Rustichello's text was translated into Latin for a precise will of the Order.[23]
Since Dominican fathers had among their missions that of evangelizing foreign peoples (cf. the role of Dominican missionaries in China[24] and in the Indies[25]), it is reasonable to think that they considered Marco's book as a trustworthy piece of information for missions in the East. The diplomatic communications between Pope Innocent IV and Pope Gregory X with the Mongols[26] were probably another reason for this endorsement. At the time, there was open discussion of a possible Christian-Mongol alliance with an anti-Islamic function.[27] In fact, a Mongol delegate was solemnly baptised at the Second Council of Lyon. At the council, Pope Gregory X promulgated a new Crusade to start in 1278 in liaison with the Mongols.[28]
Contents
The Travels is divided into four books. Book One describes the lands of the Middle East and Central Asia that Marco encountered on his way to China. Book Two describes China and the court of Kublai Khan. Book Three describes some of the coastal regions of the East: Japan, India, Sri Lanka, South-East Asia, and the east coast of Africa. Book Four describes some of the then-recent wars among the Mongols and some of the regions of the far north, like Russia. Polo's writings included descriptions of cannibals and spice-growers.
Legacy
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The Travels was a rare popular success in an era before printing.
The impact of Polo's book on cartography was delayed: the first map in which some names mentioned by Polo appear was in the Catalan Atlas of Charles V (1375), which included thirty names in China and a number of other Asian toponyms.[29] In the mid-fifteenth century the cartographer of Murano, Fra Mauro, meticulously included all of Polo's toponyms in his 1450 map of the world.
A heavily annotated copy of Polo's book was among the belongings of Columbus.[30]
Subsequent versions
French "Livre des merveilles" front pageHandwritten notes by Christopher Columbus on the Latin edition of Marco Polo's Le livre des merveilles.
Marco Polo was accompanied on his trips by his father and uncle (both of whom had been to China previously), though neither of them published any known works about their journeys. The book was translated into many European languages in Marco Polo's own lifetime, but the original manuscripts are now lost. A total of about 150 copies in various languages are known to exist. During copying and translating many errors were made, so there are many differences between the various copies.[32]
According to the French philologist Philippe Ménard,[33] there are six main versions of the book: the version closest to the original, in Franco-Venetian; a version in Old French; a version in Tuscan; two versions in Venetian; two different versions in Latin.
Version in Franco-Venetian
The oldest surviving Polo manuscript is in Franco-Venetian, which was a literary language which mixed Old French with the Venetian language, spread in Northern Italy in the 13th century;[6][7][34] for Luigi Foscolo Benedetto, this "F" text is the basic original text, which he corrected by comparing it with the somewhat more detailed Italian of Ramusio, together with a Latin manuscript in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana.
Version in Old French
A version written in Old French, titled Le Livre des merveilles (The Book of Marvels).
This version counts 18 manuscripts, whose most famous is the Code Fr. 2810.[35] Famous for its miniatures, the Code 2810 is in the French National Library. Another Old French Polo manuscript, dating to around 1350, is held by the National Library of Sweden.[36] A critical edition of this version was edited in the 2000s by Philippe Ménard.[33]
Version in Tuscan
A version in Tuscan (Italian language) titled Navigazione di messer Marco Polo was written in Florence by Michele Ormanni. It is found in the Italian National Library in Florence. Other early important sources are the manuscript "R" (Ramusio's Italian translation first printed in 1559).
Version in Venetian
The version in Venetian dialect is full of mistakes and is not considered trustworthy.[33]
Versions in Latin
One of the early manuscripts, Iter Marci Pauli Veneti, was a translation into Latin made by the Dominican brother Francesco Pipino in 1302, only three years after Marco's return to Venice.[21][37] This testifies the deep interest the Dominican Order had in the book. According to recent research by the Italian scholar Antonio Montefusco, the very close relationship Marco Polo cultivated with members of the Dominican Order in Venice suggests that Rustichello's text was translated into Latin for a precise will of the Order,[23] which had among its missions that of evangelizing foreign peoples (cf. the role of Dominican missionaries in China[24] and in the Indies[38]). This Latin version is conserved by 70 manuscripts.[33]
Another Latin version called "Z" is conserved only by one manuscript, which is to be found in Toledo, Spain. This version contains about 300 small curious additional facts about religion and ethnography in the Far East. Experts wondered whether these additions were from Marco Polo himself.[33]
Critical editions
The first attempt to collate manuscripts and provide a critical edition was in a volume of collected travel narratives printed at Venice in 1559.[39]
The editor, Giovan Battista Ramusio, collated manuscripts from the first part of the fourteenth century,[40] which he considered to be "perfettamente corretto" ("perfectly correct"). The edition of Benedetto, Marco Polo, Il Milione, under the patronage of the Comitato Geografico Nazionale Italiano (Florence: Olschki, 1928), collated sixty additional manuscript sources, in addition to some eighty that had been collected by Henry Yule, for his 1871 edition. It was Benedetto who identified Rustichello da Pisa,[41] as the original compiler or amanuensis, and his established text has provided the basis for many modern translations: his own in Italian (1932), and Aldo Ricci's The Travels of Marco Polo (London, 1931).
The first English translation is the Elizabethan version by John Frampton published in 1579, The most noble and famous travels of Marco Polo, based on Santaella's Castilian translation of 1503 (the first version in that language).[42]
A. C. Moule and Paul Pelliot published a translation under the title Description of the World that uses manuscript F as its base and attempts to combine the several versions of the text into one continuous narrative while at the same time indicating the source for each section (London, 1938). ISBN4-87187-308-0
An introduction to Marco Polo is Leonard Olschki, Marco Polo's Asia: An Introduction to His "Description of the World" Called "Il Milione", translated by John A. Scott (Berkeley: University of California) 1960; it had its origins in the celebrations of the seven hundredth anniversary of Marco Polo's birth.
Authenticity and veracity
Le livre des merveilles, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 2810, Tav. 84r "Qui hae sì gran caldo che a pena vi si puote sofferire (...). Questa gente sono tutti neri, maschi e femmine, e vanno tutti ignudi, se non se tanto ch'egliono ricuoprono loro natura con un panno molto bianco. Costoro non hanno per peccato veruna lussuria" (Translation: "People in a land of extreme heat, barely bearable. They are all dark-skinned, both men and women, and go about nearly naked, covering only their private parts with a white cloth. They see no sin in what might be considered lust.")
Since its publication, many have viewed the book with skepticism. Some in the Middle Ages viewed the book simply as a romance or fable, largely because of the sharp difference of its descriptions of a sophisticated civilisation in China to other early accounts by Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and William of Rubruck who portrayed the Mongols as "barbarians" who appeared to belong to "some other world".[44] Doubts have also been raised in later centuries about Marco Polo's narrative of his travels in China, for example for his failure to mention a number of things and practices commonly associated with China, such as Chinese characters, tea, chopsticks, and footbinding.[45] In particular, his failure to mention the Great Wall of China had been noted as early as the middle of the seventeenth century.[46] In addition, the difficulties in identifying many of the place names he used also raised suspicion about Polo's accounts.[46] Many have questioned whether or not he had visited the places he mentioned in his itinerary, or he had appropriated the accounts of his father and uncle or other travelers, or doubted that he even reached China and that, if he did, perhaps never went beyond Khanbaliq (Beijing).[46][47]
Historian Stephen G. Haw however argued that many of the "omissions" could be explained. For example, none of the other Western travelers to Yuan dynasty China at that time, such as Giovanni de' Marignolli and Odoric of Pordenone, mentioned the Great Wall, and that while remnants of the Wall would have existed at that time, it would not have been significant or noteworthy as it had not been maintained for a long time. The Great Walls were built to keep out northern invaders, whereas the ruling dynasty during Marco Polo's visit were those very northern invaders. The Mongol rulers whom Polo served also controlled territories both north and south of today's wall, and would have no reasons to maintain any fortifications that may have remained there from the earlier dynasties. He noted the Great Wall familiar to us today is a Ming structure built some two centuries after Marco Polo's travels.[48] The Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta did mention the Great Wall, but when he asked about the wall while in China during the Yuan dynasty, he could find no one who had either seen it or knew of anyone who had seen it.[48] Haw also argued that practices such as footbinding were not common even among Chinese during Polo's time and almost unknown among the Mongols. While the Italian missionary Odoric of Pordenone who visited Yuan China mentioned footbinding (it is however unclear whether he was only relaying something he heard as his description is inaccurate),[49] no other foreign visitors to Yuan China mentioned the practice, perhaps an indication that the footbinding was not widespread or was not practiced in an extreme form at that time.[50] Marco Polo himself noted (in the Toledo manuscript) the dainty walk of Chinese women who took very short steps.[48]
It has also been pointed out that Polo's accounts are more accurate and detailed than other accounts of the periods. Polo had at times denied the "marvelous" fables and legends given in other European accounts, and also omitted descriptions of strange races of people then believed to inhabit eastern Asia and given in such accounts. For example, Odoric of Pordenone said that the Yangtze river flows through the land of pygmies only three spans high and gave other fanciful tales, while Giovanni da Pian del Carpine spoke of "wild men, who do not speak at all and have no joints in their legs", monsters who looked like women but whose menfolk were dogs, and other equally fantastic accounts. Despite a few exaggerations and errors, Polo's accounts are relatively free of the descriptions of irrational marvels, and in many cases where present (mostly given in the first part before he reached China), he made a clear distinction that they are what he had heard rather than what he had seen. It is also largely free of the gross errors in other accounts such as those given by the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta who had confused the Yellow River with the Grand Canal and other waterways, and believed that porcelain was made from coal.[51]
Many of the details in Polo's accounts have been verified. For example, when visiting Zhenjiang in Jiangsu, China, Marco Polo noted that a large number of Christian churches had been built there. His claim is confirmed by a Chinese text of the 14th century explaining how a Sogdian named Mar-Sargis from Samarkand founded six Nestorian Christian churches there in addition to one in Hangzhou during the second half of the 13th century.[52] Nestorian Christianity had existed in China since the Tang dynasty (618–907 AD) when a Persian monk named Alopen came to the capital Chang'an in 635 to proselytize, as described in a dual Chinese and Syriac language inscription from Chang'an (modern Xi'an) dated to the year 781.[53]
In 2012, the University of Tübingensinologist and historian Hans Ulrich Vogel released a detailed analysis of Polo's description of currencies, salt production and revenues, and argued that the evidence supports his presence in China because he included details which he could not have otherwise known.[54][55] Vogel noted that no other Western, Arab, or Persian sources have given such accurate and unique details about the currencies of China, for example, the shape and size of the paper, the use of seals, the various denominations of paper money as well as variations in currency usage in different regions of China, such as the use of cowry shells in Yunnan, details supported by archaeological evidence and Chinese sources compiled long after Polo's had left China.[56] His accounts of salt production and revenues from the salt monopoly are also accurate, and accord with Chinese documents of the Yuan era.[57] Economic historian Mark Elvin, in his preface to Vogel's 2013 monograph, concludes that Vogel "demonstrates by specific example after specific example the ultimately overwhelming probability of the broad authenticity" of Polo's account. Many problems were caused by the oral transmission of the original text and the proliferation of significantly different hand-copied manuscripts. For instance, did Polo exert "political authority" (seignora) in Yangzhou or merely "sojourn" (sejourna) there? Elvin concludes that "those who doubted, although mistaken, were not always being casual or foolish", but "the case as a whole had now been closed": the book is, "in essence, authentic, and, when used with care, in broad terms to be trusted as a serious though obviously not always final, witness".[12]
City of Ayas visited by Marco Polo in 1271, from Le Livre des Merveilles
Although Marco Polo was certainly the most famous, he was not the only nor the first European traveler to the Mongol Empire who subsequently wrote an account of his experiences. Earlier thirteenth-century European travelers who journeyed to the court of the Great Khan were André de Longjumeau, William of Rubruck and Giovanni da Pian del Carpine with Benedykt Polak. None of them however reached China itself. Later travelers such as Odoric of Pordenone and Giovanni de' Marignolli reached China during the Yuan dynasty and wrote accounts of their travels.[49][48]
The Moroccan merchant Ibn Battuta traveled through the Golden Horde and China subsequently in the early-to-mid-14th century. The 14th-century author John Mandeville wrote an account of journeys in the East, but this was probably based on second-hand information and contains much apocryphal information.
Footnotes
↑ ... volendosi ravvisare nella parola "Milione" la forma ridotta di un diminutivo arcaico "Emilione" che pare sia servito a meglio identificare il nostro Marco distinguendolo per tal modo da tutti i numerosi Marchi della sua famiglia. (Ranieri Allulli, MARCO POLO E IL LIBRO DELLE MERAVIGLIE – Dialogo in tre tempi del giornalista Qualunquelli Junior e dell'astrologo Barbaverde, Milano, Mondadori, 1954, p.26)
↑ Sofri (2001) "Il secondo fu che Marco e i suoi usassero, pare, per distinguersi da altri Polo veneziani, il nome di Emilione, che è l' origine prosaica del titolo che si è imposto: Il Milione."
↑ Carl R. Lindahl; John McNamara; John Lindow, eds. (2000). Medieval Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs. Vol.I. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. p.368. ABC-CLIO
↑ The date usually given as 1292 was emended in a note by Chih-chiu & Yung-chi (1945, p.51), reporting that Polo's Chinese companions were recorded as preparing to leave in September 1290.
↑ Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West: 1221-1410 (New York: Routledge 2014), especially pp. 167-196. B. Roberg, "Die Tartaren auf dem 2. Konzil von Lyon 1274", Annuarium historiae conciliarum 5 (1973), 241-302.
↑ Jean Richard, Histoire des Croisades (Paris: Fayard 1996), p.465
↑ "1274: Promulgation of a Crusade, in liaison with the Mongols", Jean Richard, "Histoire des Croisades", p.502/French, p. 487/English
↑ The exhibition in Venice celebrating the seven hundredth anniversary of Polo's birth L'Asia nella Cartographia dell'Occidente, Tullia Leporini Gasparace, curator, Venice 1955. (unverifiable)
↑ Bibliothèque Nationale MS. français 1116. For details, see, A. C. Moule and Paul Pelliot, Marco Polo: The Description of the World (London, 1938), p.41.
↑ Its title was Secondo volume delle Navigationi et Viaggi nel quale si contengono l'Historia delle cose de' Tartari, et diuversi fatti de loro Imperatori, descritta da M. Marco Polo, Gentilhuomo di Venezia.... Herriott (1937) reports the recovery of a 1795 copy of the Ghisi manuscript, clarifying many obscure passages in Ramusio's printed text.
↑ "scritti gia piu di dugento anni (a mio giudico)."
Gaunt, Simon (2013), Marco Polo's 'Le Devisement du Monde'. Narrative Voice, Language and Diversity, Gallica, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ISBN978-1-8438-4352-8 .
Haw, Stephen G. (2006), Marco Polo's China: A Venetian in the Realm of Khubilai Khan, Routledge Studies in the Early History of Asia, London; New York: Routledge, ISBN0-415-34850-1 .
Larner, John (1999), Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN0-300-07971-0 .
Olschki, Leonardo (1960), Marco Polo's Asia: An Introduction to His "Description of the World" Called "Il Milione", translated by John A. Scott, Berkeley: University of California Press, OCLC397577 .
Chih-chiu, Yang; Yung-chi, Ho (September 1945). "Marco Polo Quits China". Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. 9 (1): 51. doi:10.2307/2717993. JSTOR2717993.
Emmerick, R. E. (2003), "Iranian Settlement East of the Pamirs", in Yarshater, Ehsan (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol III: The Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian Periods, Cambridge University Press, doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521200929.009 .
Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant, explorer and writer who travelled through Asia along the Silk Road between 1271 and 1295. His travels are recorded in The Travels of Marco Polo, a book that described the then-mysterious culture and inner workings of the Eastern world, including the wealth and great size of the Mongol Empire and China under the Yuan dynasty, giving Europeans their first comprehensive look into China, Persia, India, Japan, and other Asian societies.
Prester John was a mythical Christian patriarch, presbyter, and king. Stories popular in Europe in the 12th to the 17th centuries told of a Nestorian patriarch and king who was said to rule over a Christian nation lost amid the pagans and Muslims in the Orient. The accounts were often embellished with various tropes of medieval popular fantasy, depicting Prester John as a descendant of the Three Magi, ruling a kingdom full of riches, marvels, and strange creatures.
Colonel Sir Henry Yule was a Scottish Orientalist and geographer. He published many travel books, including translations of the work of Marco Polo and Mirabilia by the 14th-century Dominican Friar Jordanus. He was also the compiler of a dictionary of Anglo-Indian terms, the Hobson-Jobson, with Arthur Coke Burnell.
Cathay is a historical name for China that was used in Europe. During the early modern period, the term Cathay initially evolved as a term referring to what is now Northern China, completely separate and distinct from China, which was a reference to southern China. As knowledge of East Asia increased, Cathay came to be seen as the same polity as China as a whole. The term Cathay became a poetic name for China.
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, commonly known as Mandeville's Travels, is a book written between 1357 and 1371 that purports to be the travel memoir of an Englishman named Sir John Mandeville across the Islamic world as far as India and China. The earliest-surviving text is in French, followed by translations into many other languages; the work acquired extraordinary popularity. Despite the extremely unreliable and often fantastical nature of the travels it describes, it was used as a work of reference: Christopher Columbus, for example, was heavily influenced by both this work and Marco Polo's earlier Travels.
Khanbaliq or Dadu of Yuan was the winter capital of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty in what is now Beijing, the capital of China today. It was located at the center of modern Beijing. The Secretariat directly administered the Central Region of the Yuan dynasty and dictated policies for the other provinces. As emperors of the Yuan dynasty, Kublai Khan and his successors also claimed supremacy over the entire Mongol Empire following the death of Möngke in 1259. Over time the unified empire gradually fragmented into a number of khanates.
William of Rubruck or Guillaume de Rubrouck was a Flemish Franciscan missionary and explorer.
Rustichello da Pisa, also known as Rusticiano, was an Italian romance writer in Franco-Italian language. He is best known for co-writing Marco Polo's autobiography, The Travels of Marco Polo, while they were in prison together in Genoa. Earlier, he wrote the Roman de Roi Artus, also known as the Compilation, the earliest known Arthurian romance by an Italian author.
Odoric of Pordenone was a Franciscan friar and missionary explorer from Friuli in northeast Italy. He journeyed through India, Sumatra, Java, and China, where he spent three years in the imperial capital of Khanbaliq. After more than ten years of travel, he returned home and dictated a narrative of his experiences and observations called the Relatio, highlighting various cultural, religious, and social peculiarities he encountered in Asia.
Jordan Catala of Sévérac was an Occitanian Dominican missionary and explorer in Asia known for his Mirabilia descripta describing the marvels of the East. He was the first bishop of the diocese of Quilon, the first Roman Catholic diocese in the Indian subcontinent.
Khutulun, also known as Aigiarne, Aiyurug, Khotol Tsagaan or Ay Yaruq was a Mongol noblewoman, the most famous daughter of Kaidu, a cousin of Kublai Khan. Both Marco Polo and Rashid al-Din Hamadani wrote accounts of their encounters with her.
John of Montecorvino, OFM was an Italian Franciscan missionary, traveller and statesman, founder of the earliest Latin Catholic missions in India and China, and Archbishop of Peking. He converted many people during his missionary work and established several churches in Yuan dynasty-held Beijing. John wrote a letter intending to convert the Great Khan to Catholicism. He was a contemporary of Marco Polo.
Marco Polo is a 1982 American-Italian television miniseries originally broadcast by NBC in the United States and by RAI in Italy. It stars Kenneth Marshall as Marco Polo, the 13th-century Venetian merchant and explorer. The series also features appearances by Denholm Elliott, Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud, Burt Lancaster, Ian McShane, Leonard Nimoy, and others. It was originally broadcast in four episodes, where episodes 1 and 4 were twice as long as episodes 2 and 3. The series is sometimes divided into six equally long episodes.
Kököchin, also Kökejin, Kūkājīn, Cocacin or Cozotine, was a 13th-century princess of the Mongol-led Chinese Yuan dynasty, belonging to the Mongol Bayaut tribe. In 1291, she was betrothed to the Ilkhanate khan Arghun by the Yuan founding emperor Kublai, but eventually was married to his son Ghazan when Arghun died by the time she arrived in Persia in 1293. The account of Kököchin's journey to Persia was given by Marco Polo, who was part of her entourage.
La grande isle de Java was, according to Marco Polo, the largest island in the world; his Java Minor was the actual island of Sumatra, which takes its name from the city of Samudera situated on its northern coast.
Given textual and archaeological evidence, it is thought that thousands of Europeans lived in Imperial China during the Yuan dynasty. These were people from countries traditionally belonging to the lands of Christendom during the High to Late Middle Ages who visited, traded, performed Christian missionary work, or lived in China. This occurred primarily during the second half of the 13th century and the first half of the 14th century, coinciding with the rule of the Mongol Empire, which ruled over a large part of Eurasia and connected Europe with their Chinese dominion of the Yuan dynasty. Whereas the Byzantine Empire centered in Greece and Anatolia maintained rare incidences of correspondence with the Tang, Song and Ming dynasties of China, the Holy See sent several missionaries and embassies to the early Mongol Empire as well as to Khanbaliq, the capital of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty of China. These contacts with the West were preceded by rare interactions between the Han dynasty and Hellenistic Greeks and Romans.
Niccolò Polo and Maffeo Polo were Italian traveling merchants from the Republic of Venice, best known as the father and uncle, respectively, of the explorer Marco Polo. The brothers went into business before Marco's birth, established trading posts in Constantinople, Sudak in Crimea, and in a western part of the Mongol Empire in Asia. As a duo, they reached modern-day China before temporarily returning to Europe to deliver a message to the Pope. Taking Niccolò's son Marco with them, the Polos then made another journey through Asia, which became the subject of Marco's account The Travels of Marco Polo.
Did Marco Polo Go to China? is a 1995 book by Frances Wood, arguing that Italian explorer Marco Polo never visited China but travelled no further than Persia and that he based his description of China on accounts from Persian travelers.
Marco Polo – The Journey is an album by Ensemble Renaissance, released in 1992 on the Artelier Music label in Germany. It is Renaissance's 11th album. The heme of the album is early music from the time of the travels of Marco Polo. It is one of the Renaissance's more eclectic works, covering not only the instrumental istanpittas of the Italian Trecento and earlier Franciscan laudas, but also Byzantine chant, girl songs from Cyprus preserved in the Manuscript 1203 kept in Iviron monastery, Persian and Arabic dances, traditional Music of Mongolia and Ancient Chinese ceremonial music. Marco Polo is one of the Ensemble's biggest successes, having spent a few weeks at the top of the classical music charts in Germany, in the 1993.
Livre des merveilles du monde(BnF Fr2810) is an illuminated manuscript made in France around 1410–1412. It is a collection of several texts concerning commercial, religious, and diplomatic contact between Europe and Asia. The authors of these texts include Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone, Wilhelm von Boldensele, Uzbeg, Benedict XII, John Mandeville, Hayton of Corycus, Riccoldo da Monte di Croce, and others. The manuscript contains 297 folios and 265 miniatures. It has a long history of being owned by prominent French figures and families. It is currently kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
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