Marco Polo

Marco Polo ( 8 January 1324) 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 (also known as Book of the Marvels of the World and Il Milione, ), 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.

Born in Venice, Marco learned the mercantile trade from his father and his uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo, who travelled through Asia and met Kublai Khan. In 1269, they returned to Venice to meet Marco for the first time. The three of them embarked on an epic journey to Asia, exploring many places along the Silk Road until they reached "Cathay". They were received by the royal court of Kublai Khan, who was impressed by Marco's intelligence and humility. Marco was appointed to serve as Kublai's foreign emissary, and he was sent on many diplomatic missions throughout the empire and Southeast Asia, visiting present-day Myanmar, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. As part of this appointment, Marco also travelled extensively inside China, living in the emperor's lands for 17 years and seeing many things previously unknown to Europeans.

Around 1291, the Polos offered to accompany the Mongol princess Kököchin to Persia; they arrived there around 1293. After leaving the princess, they travelled overland to Constantinople and then to Venice, returning home after 24 years. and many other travellers. There is substantial literature based on Polo's writings; he also influenced European cartography, leading to the introduction of the Catalan Atlas and the Fra Mauro map.

Life

thumb|A commemorative plaque on the site of Casa Polo in Venice, part of the [[Teatro Malibran which was built upon Polo's house]]

thumb|upright=.7|, Venice, next to Polo's house, is named after the nickname of Polo,

Family origin

Marco Polo was born around 1254 in Venice, but the exact date and place of birth are archivally unknown. The Travels of Marco Polo contains some basic information concerning Marco Polo's Venetian family and his birth in Venice; the book states that Marco's father, the travelling merchant Niccolò Polo, returned to visit his family in his hometown of Venice around 1269 and there found out that his wife, whom he had left pregnant, had died and left a 15-year-old son named Marco.

In contrast to the general consensus, there are theories suggesting that Marco Polo's birthplace was the island of Korčula

Nickname

He was nicknamed during his lifetime (which in Italian literally means 'Million'). The Italian title of his book was Il Libro di Marco Polo soprannominato Milione, which means "The Book of Marco Polo, nicknamed 'Milione. According to the 15th-century humanist Giovanni Battista Ramusio, his fellow citizens awarded him this nickname when he came back to Venice because he kept on saying that Kublai Khan's wealth was counted in millions. More precisely, he was nicknamed (Mr Marco Millions).

However, since also his father Niccolò was nicknamed , 19th-century philologist Luigi Foscolo Benedetto was persuaded that was a shortened version of , and that this nickname was used to distinguish Niccolò's and Marco's branch from other Polo families.

Early life and Asian travel

thumb|upright|A [[mosaic of Marco Polo displayed in the Palazzo Doria-Tursi, Genoa, Italy]]

His father, Niccolò Polo, a merchant, traded with the Near East, becoming wealthy and achieving great prestige. Niccolò and his brother Maffeo set off on a trading voyage before Marco's birth. In 1260, Niccolò and Maffeo, while residing in Constantinople, then the capital of the Latin Empire, foresaw a political change; they liquidated their assets into jewels and moved away. According to The Travels of Marco Polo, they passed through much of Asia, and met with Kublai Khan, a Mongol ruler and founder of the Yuan dynasty.

Almost nothing is known about the childhood of Marco Polo until he was fifteen years old, except that he probably spent part of his childhood in Venice. Meanwhile, Marco Polo's mother died, and an aunt and uncle raised him.

In 1269, Niccolò and Maffeo returned to their families in Venice, meeting young Marco for the first time. In 1271, during the rule of Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo, Marco Polo (at seventeen years of age), his father, and his uncle set off for Asia on the series of adventures that Marco later documented in his book.

thumb|A close-up of the [[Catalan Atlas depicting Marco Polo travelling to the East during the Pax Mongolica]]

They sailed to Acre and later rode on their camels to the Persian port Hormuz. During the first stages of the journey, they stayed for a few months in Acre and were able to speak with Archdeacon Tedaldo Visconti of Piacenza. The Polo family, on that occasion, had expressed their regret at the long lack of a pope, because on their previous trip to China they had received a letter from Kublai Khan to the Pope, and had thus had to leave for China disappointed.

During the trip, they received news that after 33 months of vacation, the Conclave had elected the new Pope and that he was exactly the archdeacon of Acre. The three of them hurried to return to the Holy Land, where the new Pope entrusted them with letters for the "Great Khan", inviting him to send his emissaries to Rome. To give more weight to this mission, he sent with the Polos, as his legates, two Dominican fathers, Guglielmo of Tripoli and Nicola of Piacenza.

They continued overland until they arrived at Kublai Khan's palace in Shangdu, China, then known as Cathay. By this time, Marco was 21 years old. Impressed by Marco's intelligence and humility, Kublai appointed him to serve as his foreign emissary to India and Myanmar. He was sent on many diplomatic missions throughout his empire and in Southeast Asia, such as in present-day Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam, When the Polos arrived to Persia, they learned that Arghun Khan died, and Kököchin eventually became a wife of his son Ghazan. After leaving the princess, the Polos travelled overland to Constantinople. They later decided to return to their home.

They returned to Venice in 1295, after 24 years, with many riches and treasures. They had travelled almost . to join the war. He was probably caught by Genoans in a skirmish in 1296, off the Anatolian coast between Adana and the Gulf of Alexandretta (and not during the Battle of Curzola (September 1298), off the Dalmatian coast, a claim which is due to a later tradition (16th century) recorded by Giovanni Battista Ramusio).

He spent several months of his imprisonment dictating a detailed account of his travels to a fellow inmate, Rustichello da Pisa, In 2022, it was found that Polo first had a daughter named Agnese (b. 1295/1299 – d. 1319) from a partnership or marriage which ended before 1300.

Pietro d'Abano, a philosopher, doctor and astrologer based in Padua, reports having spoken with Marco Polo about what he had observed in the vault of the sky during his travels. Marco told him that during his return trip to the South China Sea, he had spotted what he describes in a drawing as a star "shaped like a sack" (in ) with a big tail (); most likely a comet. Astronomers agree that there were no comets sighted in Europe at the end of the 13th century, but there are records about a comet sighted in China and Indonesia in 1293. This circumstance does not appear in Polo's book of travels. Peter D'Abano kept the drawing in his volume Conciliator Differentiarum, quæ inter Philosophos et Medicos Versantur. Marco Polo gave Pietro other astronomical observations he made in the Southern Hemisphere, and also a description of the Sumatran rhinoceros, which are collected in the Conciliator. and to whom Polo bequeathed 100 lire of Venetian denari.

He divided up the rest of his assets, including several properties, among individuals, religious institutions, and every guild and fraternity to which he belonged. He also wrote off multiple debts, including 300 lire that his sister-in-law owed him, and others for the convent of San Giovanni, San Paolo of the Order of Preachers, and a cleric named Friar Benvenuto. He ordered 220 soldi be paid to Giovanni Giustiniani for his work as a notary and his prayers.

The will was not signed by Polo, but it was validated by the then-relevant "signum manus" rule, by which the testator had only to touch the document to make it legally valid. Due to the Venetian law stating that the day ends at sunset, the exact date of Marco Polo's death cannot be determined, but according to some scholars it was between the sunsets of 8 and 9 January 1324. Biblioteca Marciana, which holds the original copy of his testament, dates the testament on 9 January 1324, and it gives the date of his death at some time in June 1324.

Polo related his memoirs orally to Rustichello da Pisa while both were prisoners of the Genova Republic. Rustichello wrote Devisement du Monde in Franco-Venetian. The idea probably was to create a handbook for merchants, essentially a text on weights, measures and distances.

The oldest surviving manuscript is in Old French heavily flavoured with Italian; According to the Italian scholar Luigi Foscolo Benedetto, this "F" text is the basic original text, which he corrected by comparing it with the somewhat more detailed Italian of Giovanni Battista Ramusio, together with a Latin manuscript in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Other early important sources are "R" (Ramusio's Italian translation first printed in 1559), and "Z" (a 15th-century Latin manuscript kept at Toledo, Spain). Another Old French Polo manuscript, dating to around 1350, is held by the National Library of Sweden.

One of the early manuscripts was a translation into Latin made by the Dominican brother Francesco Pipino in 1302, just a few years after Marco's return to Venice. Since Latin was then the most widespread and authoritative language of culture, it is suggested that Rustichello's text was translated into Latin for a precise will of the Dominican Order, and this helped to promote the book on a European scale.

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).

The published editions of Polo's book rely on single manuscripts, blend multiple versions together, or add notes to clarify, for example in the English translation by Henry Yule. The 1938 English translation by Moule and Paul Pelliot is based on a Latin manuscript found in the library of the Cathedral of Toledo in 1932, and is 50% longer than other versions. The popular translation published by Penguin Books in 1958 by Latham works several texts together to make a readable whole. Sharon Kinoshita's 2016 version takes as its source the Franco-Italian "F" manuscript, and invites readers to "focus on the text as the product of a larger European (and Eurasian) literary and commercial culture", rather than questions of veracity of the account.

Narrative

thumb|Polo meeting [[Kublai Khan]]

The book opens with a preface describing his father and uncle travelling to Bolghar where Prince Berke Khan lived. A year later, they went to Ukek and continued to Bukhara. There, an envoy from the Levant invited them to meet Kublai Khan, who had never met Europeans. In 1266, they reached the seat of Kublai Khan at Dadu, present-day Beijing, China. Kublai received the brothers with hospitality and asked them many questions regarding the European legal and political system. He also inquired about the Pope and Church in Rome. After the brothers answered the questions he tasked them with delivering a letter to the Pope, requesting 100 Christians acquainted with the Seven Arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy). Kublai Khan requested also that an envoy bring him back oil of the lamp in Jerusalem. The long between the death of Pope Clement IV in 1268 and the election of his successor delayed the Polos in fulfilling Kublai's request. They followed the suggestion of Theobald Visconti, then papal legate for the realm of Egypt, and returned to Venice in 1269 or 1270 to await the nomination of the new Pope, which allowed Marco to see his father for the first time, at the age of fifteen or sixteen.

thumb|left|upright=.6|Statue of Marco Polo in Hangzhou, China

In 1271, Niccolò, Maffeo, and Marco Polo embarked on their voyage to fulfil Kublai's request. They sailed to Acre, and then rode on camels to the Persian port of Hormuz. The Polos wanted to sail straight into China, but the ships there were not seaworthy, so they continued overland through the Silk Road, until reaching Kublai's summer palace in Shangdu, near present-day Zhangjiakou. In one instance during their trip, the Polos joined a caravan of travelling merchants whom they crossed paths with. Unfortunately, the party was soon attacked by bandits, who used the cover of a sandstorm to ambush them. The Polos managed to fight and escape through a nearby town, but many members of the caravan were killed or enslaved. Three and a half years after leaving Venice, when Marco was about 21 years old, the Polos were welcomed by Kublai into his palace. They were highly respected and sought after in the Mongolian court, and so Kublai Khan decided to decline the Polos' requests to leave China. They became worried about returning home safely, believing that if Kublai died, his enemies might turn against them because of their close involvement with the ruler. In 1292, Kublai's great-nephew, then ruler of Persia, sent representatives to China in search of a potential wife, and they asked the Polos to accompany them, so they were permitted to return to Persia with the wedding partywhich left that same year from Zaitun in southern China on a fleet of 14 junks. The party sailed to the port of Singapore, travelled north to Sumatra, and around the southern tip of India, eventually crossing the Arabian Sea to Hormuz. The two-year voyage was perilousof the six hundred people (not including the crew) in the convoy only eighteen had survived (including all three Polos). The Polos left the wedding party after reaching Hormuz and travelled overland to the port of Trebizond on the Black Sea, the present-day Trabzon. 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 Franco-Venetian language, which was a literary-only language widespread in northern Italy between the subalpine belt and the lower Po between the 13th and 15th centuries.

Latham also argued that Rustichello may have glamorised Polo's accounts, and added fantastic and romantic elements that made the book a bestseller. 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, Latham believed that many elements of the book, such as legends of the Middle East and mentions of exotic marvels, might have been the work of Rustichello, who was giving what medieval European readers expected to find in a travel book.

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 father Francesco Pipino was the author of a translation into in 1302, just a few years after Marco's return to Venice. Francesco Pipino solemnly affirmed the truthfulness of the book and defined Marco as a "prudent, honoured and faithful man". In his writings, the Dominican brother Jacopo d'Acqui explains why his contemporaries were sceptical 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". and in the Indies), 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 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. 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.

Authenticity and veracity

thumb|upright|Kublai Khan's court, from the French "Livre des merveilles"

Since its publication, some have viewed the book with skepticism. 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 the Great Wall of China, and in particular the difficulties in identifying many of the place names he used (the great majority, however, have since been identified). Many have questioned whether he had visited the places he mentioned in his itinerary, whether he had appropriated the accounts of his father and uncle or other travellers, and some doubted whether he even reached China, or that if he did, perhaps never went beyond Khanbaliq (Beijing).

Modern studies have further shown that details given in Marco Polo's book, such as the currencies used, salt productions and revenues, are accurate and unique. Such detailed descriptions are not found in other non-Chinese sources, and their accuracy is supported by archaeological evidence as well as Chinese records compiled after Polo had left China. His accounts are therefore unlikely to have been obtained second hand. His story of the princess Kököchin sent from China to Persia to marry the Īl-khān is also confirmed by independent sources in both Persia and China. His failure to note the presence of the Great Wall of China was first raised in the middle of the 17th century, and in the middle of the 18th century, it was suggested that he had never reached China. This is taken further by Frances Wood, who claimed in her 1995 book Did Marco Polo Go to China? that at best Polo never went farther east than Persia (modern Iran), and that there is nothing in The Book of Marvels about China that could not have been obtained by reading Persian books. Wood maintains that it is more probable that Polo went only to Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey) and some of the Italian merchant colonies around the Black Sea, picking hearsay from those travellers who had been farther east.

Other Europeans who travelled to Khanbaliq during the Yuan dynasty, such as Giovanni de' Marignolli and Odoric of Pordenone, said nothing about the wall either. The Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta, who asked about the wall when he visited China during the Yuan dynasty, could find no one who either had seen it, or knew of anyone who had seen it, suggesting that while ruins of the wall constructed in the earlier periods might have existed, they were not significant or noteworthy at that time. no other foreign visitors to Yuan China mentioned the practice, perhaps an indication that the footbinding was not widespread or was not practised in an extreme form at that time. Marco Polo noted in the Toledo manuscript, the dainty walk of Chinese women who took very short steps. Haw pointed out that despite the few omissions, Marco Polo's account is more extensive, more accurate and more detailed than those of other foreign travellers to China in this period. Marco Polo even observed Chinese nautical inventions such as the watertight compartments of bulkhead partitions in Chinese ships, knowledge of which he was keen to share with his fellow Venetians.

In addition to Haw, other scholars have argued in favour of the established view that Polo was in China, in response to Wood's book. The historian David Morgan points out basic errors made in Wood's book such as confusing the Liao dynasty with the Jin dynasty, and he found no compelling evidence in the book that would convince him that Marco Polo did not go to China.

Haw argues in his book Marco Polo's China that Marco's account is much more correct and accurate than has often been supposed and that it is extremely unlikely that he could have obtained all the information in his book from secondhand sources. Haw criticizes Wood's approach to finding mention of Marco Polo in Chinese texts by contending that contemporaneous Europeans had little regard for using surnames and that a direct Chinese transliteration of the name "Marco" ignores the possibility of his taking on a Chinese or even Mongol name with no similarity to his Latin name.

In reply to Wood, Jørgen Jensen recalled the meeting of Marco Polo and Pietro d'Abano in the late 13th century. During this meeting, Marco gave to Pietro details of the astronomical observations he had made on his journey. These observations are compatible with Marco's stay in China, Sumatra, and the South China Sea and are recorded in Pietro's book Conciliator Differentiarum, but not in Marco's Book of Travels.

Reviewing Haw's book, Peter Jackson (author of The Mongols and the West) has said that Haw "must surely now have settled the controversy surrounding the historicity of Polo's visit to China". Igor de Rachewiltz's review, which refutes Wood's points, concludes with a strongly worded condemnation:

Allegations of exaggeration

thumb|upright|A bust of Marco Polo in the garden of [[Villa Borghese in Rome, Italy]]

Some scholars believe that Marco Polo exaggerated his importance in China. The British historian David Morgan thought that Polo had likely exaggerated and lied about his status in China, In the 1960s the German historian Herbert Franke noted that all occurrences of Po-lo or Bolod in Yuan texts were names of people of Mongol or Turkic extraction. According to the History of Yuan, Boluo was released at the request of the emperor himself, and was then transferred to the region of Ningxia, in the northeast of present-day China, in the spring of 1275. The date could correspond to the first mission of which Marco Polo speaks.

If this identification is correct, there is a record about Marco Polo in Chinese sources. These conjectures seem to be supported by the fact that in addition to the imperial dignitary Saman (the one who had arrested the official named "Boluo"), the documents mention his brother, Xiangwei (). According to sources, Saman died shortly after the incident, while Xiangwei was transferred to Yangzhou in 1282–1283. Marco Polo reports that he was moved to Hangzhou the following year, in 1284. It has been supposed that these displacements are due to the intention to avoid further conflicts between the two.

The sinologist Paul Pelliot thought that Polo might have served as an officer of the government salt monopoly in Yangzhou, which was a position of some significance that could explain the exaggeration. He points out that Polo never claimed to hold high rank, such as a darughachi, who led a tumen – a unit that was normally 10,000 strong. Polo does not even imply that he had led 1,000 personnel. Haw points out that Polo himself appears to state only that he had been an emissary of the khan, in a position with some esteem. According to Haw, this is a reasonable claim if Polo was, for example, a keshig – a member of the imperial guard by the same name, which included as many as 14,000 individuals at the time.

Another contradictory claim is at chapter 145 when The Book of Marvels states that the three Polos provided the Mongols with technical advice on building mangonels during the Siege of Xiangyang,

Since the siege was over in 1273, before Marco Polo had arrived in China for the first time, the claim cannot be true. The Mongol army that besieged Xiangyang did have foreign military engineers, but they were mentioned in Chinese sources as being from Baghdad and had Arabic names. Archaeologists have also pointed out that Polo may have mixed up the details from the two attempted invasions of Japan by Kublai Khan in 1274 and 1281. Polo wrote of five-masted ships, when archaeological excavations found that the ships had only three masts.

Appropriation

Historian Frances Wood accused Marco Polo of taking other people's accounts in his book, retelling other stories as his own, or basing his accounts on Persian guidebooks or other lost sources. For example, Sinologist Francis Woodman Cleaves noted that Polo's account of the voyage of the princess Kököchin from China to Persia to marry the Īl-khān in 1293 has been confirmed by a passage in the 15th-century Chinese work Yongle Encyclopedia and by the Persian historian Rashid-al-Din Hamadani in his work Jami' al-tawarikh. However, neither of these accounts mentions Polo or indeed any European as part of the bridal party, and Wood used the lack of mention of Polo in these works as an example of Polo's "retelling of a well-known tale". David O. Morgan, in Polo's defence, noted that even the princess herself was not mentioned in the Chinese source and that it would have been surprising if Polo had been mentioned by Rashid-al-Din. Rachewiltz argued that Marco Polo's account allows the Persian and Chinese sources to be reconciled – by relaying the information that two of the three envoys sent (mentioned in the Chinese source and whose names accord with those given by Polo) had died during the voyage, it explains why only the third who survived, Coja/Khoja, was mentioned by Rashìd al-Dìn. Polo had therefore completed the story by providing information not found in either source. He also noted that the only Persian source that mentions the princess was not completed until 1310–1311, therefore Marco Polo could not have learned the information from any Persian book. According to de Rachewiltz, the concordance of Polo's detailed account of the princess with other independent sources that gave only incomplete information is proof of the veracity of Polo's story and his presence in China. Haw dismisses the various anachronistic criticisms of Polo's accounts that started in the 17th century, and highlights Polo's accuracy in great part of his accounts, for example on features of the landscape such as the Grand Canal of China. "If Marco was a liar," Haw writes, "then he must have been an implausibly meticulous one."

In 2012, the University of Tübingen Sinologist 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. 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 the Polos had left China. His accounts of salt production and revenues from the salt monopoly are also accurate, and accord with Chinese documents of the Yuan era.

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."

Legacy

Further exploration

Other lesser-known European explorers had already travelled to China, such as Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, but Polo's book meant that his journey was the first to be widely known. Christopher Columbus was inspired enough by Polo's description of the Far East to want to visit those lands for himself. A copy of Polo's book was among his belongings, with handwritten annotations. The 1453 Fra Mauro map was said by Giovanni Battista Ramusio (disputed by historian/cartographer Piero Falchetta, in whose work the quote appears) to have been partially based on the one brought from Cathay by Marco Polo: The authenticity of these maps is uncertain. Benjamin B. Olshin a historian who wrote for the University of Chicago Press has been unable to "establish the authenticity" According to The Telegraph, a radiocarbon study of the sheepskin the maps are made of date back to the 15th or 16th century strongly suggesting they are copies of the original maps.

Pasta myth

There is a legend about Marco Polo importing pasta from China; however, it is actually a popular misconception, originating with the Macaroni Journal, published by a food industry association with the goal of promoting the use of pasta in the United States. Marco Polo describes in his book a food similar to "lasagna", but he uses a term with which he was already familiar. Pasta had already been invented in Italy a long time before Marco Polo's travels to Asia.

According to the National Macaroni Manufacturers Association durum wheat was introduced by Arabs from Libya, during their rule over Sicily in the late 9th century, predating Marco Polo's travels by about four centuries. who described it during his crossing of Pamir (ancient Mount Imeon) in 1271.

In 1851, a three-masted clipper built in Saint John, New Brunswick took his name. The Marco Polo was the first ship to sail around the world in under six months. The airport in Venice is named Venice Marco Polo Airport.

A square in Tianjin is named Marco Polo Square. In 2010, the Marco Polo Memorial Hall was erected in Yangzhou, and renovated in 2023.

Croatian state-owned shipping company's (Jadrolinija) ship connecting Split with Ancona in Italy is named after Marco Polo.

Arts, entertainment, and media

Film

The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938), directed by Archie Mayo
Marco Polo (1961)
Marco the Magnificent (1965)
Marco (1973), directed by Seymour Robbie
Marco Polo () (1975), directed by Chang Cheh
Marco Polo Junior Versus the Red Dragon (1972), Australian animated film by Eric Porter

Games

The game "Marco Polo" is a form of tag played in a swimming pool or on land, with slightly modified rules.
Polo appears as a Great Explorer in the 2008 strategy video game Civilization Revolution.
Marco Polo's 1292 voyage from China is used as a backdrop for the plot of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (2009), where Nathan Drake, the protagonist, searches for the Cintamani Stone, which was from the fabled city of Shambhala.
A board game The Voyages of Marco Polo plays over a map of Eurasia, with multiple routes to 'recreate' Polo's journey.

Literature

The travels of Marco Polo are fictionalised in a number of works, such as:

Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne's Messer Marco Polo (1921)
Eugene O'Neill's Marco Millions (1928)
Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities (1972), in which Polo appears as a pivotal character.
Gary Jennings' novel The Journeyer (1984)
Avram Davidson's novel (written with Grania Davis) Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty (1988), a serio-comic fantasy with Polo as the protagonist.
James Rollins' SIGMA Force Book 4: The Judas Strain (2007), in which facts about Polo's travels and conjecture about secrets he kept are interleaved with modern-day action.

Television

In the 1953 television series You Are There, Polo was portrayed by John Cassavetes in the episode "The Great Adventure of Marco Polo".
In the 1964 serial Marco Polo of the television series Doctor Who, Polo was portrayed by Mark Eden.
In the 1979 anime The Adventures of Marco Polo, Polo is voiced by Kei Tomiyama.
The television miniseries, Marco Polo (1982), featuring Ken Marshall, Burt Lancaster and Ruocheng Ying, and directed by Giuliano Montaldo, depicts Polo's travels. It won two Emmy Awards, and was nominated for six more.
The television film, Marco Polo (2007), starring Brian Dennehy as Kublai Khan, and Ian Somerhalder as Marco, portrays Marco Polo being left alone in China while his uncle and father return to Venice, to be reunited with him many years later.
In the Footsteps of Marco Polo (2009) is a PBS documentary about two friends (Denis Belliveau and Francis O'Donnell) who conceived of the ultimate road trip to retrace Marco Polo's journey from Venice to China via land and sea.
In Search of Marco Polo (2013), a Croatian documentary miniseries written and directed by Miro Branković.
Marco Polo (2014–2016) is a Netflix television drama series about Marco Polo's early years in the court of Kublai Khan created by John Fusco.

Notes

References

Sources

(Article republished in 2006 World Almanac Books, available online from History.com)

External links

Marco Polo on IMDb
Marco Polo's house in Venice, near the church of San Giovanni Grisostomo
National Geographic Marco Polo: Journey from Venice to China
Marco Polo's Orient Film on the material culture of areas along Polo's route using objects from the collections of the Glasgow Museums