Indice
3 What made Marco Polo’s voyage possible 4 The Venice of Marco Polo 5 Marco Polo’s family 6 Background of trade through the Orient 7 The voyage of Matthew and Nicolai Polo 8 The great voyage of Marco Polo 8.1 The way to the Orient 8.2 Arrival in China 9 The Great Khan Kublai and his power 9.1 Characteristics of the imperial court 9.2 Culture and civilization of the Mongol empire 9.3 Religion 9.4 The fantasies of China 10 Journey through the interior of China 10.1 The battle of the elephants 10. 2 The city of Hangchow 11 Sailing in China and the invasion of Japan 12 The journey to Indochina 12.1 The Gulf of Tonkin 12.2 The reasons for his journey to Indochina 12. 3 India 13 The return home 14 The book of Marco Polo 15 Conclusions 15 Sources Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 5 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 9 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 13 Page 14 Page 16 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 23 Page 23 Page 25 Page 27 Page 28 Page 30 1.
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The book made Marco a celebrity. It was printed in French, Italian and Latin, becoming the most popular read in Europe. But few readers allowed themselves to believe Marco’s story. They took it as fiction, the construction of a man with a wild imagination. The work eventually earned another title: Il Milione (The Million Lies). Marco, however, stood behind his book and influenced later adventurers and traders.
Although he was born into a wealthy Venetian merchant family, much of Marco Polo’s childhood was spent without parents and was raised by an extended family. Polo’s mother died when he was young, and his father and uncle, the successful jewelry merchants Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, were in Asia for much of Polo’s youth.
Niccolo and Maffeo’s travels took them to present-day China, where they joined a diplomatic mission to the court of Kublai Khan, the Mongol leader whose grandfather, Genghis Khan, had conquered northeast Asia. In 1269, the two men returned to Venice and immediately began making plans for their return to Khan’s court. During their stay with the leader, Khan expressed an interest in Christianity and asked the Polo brothers to return to visit him with 100 priests and a collection of holy water bottles.
The travels of marco p
Marco PoloIn 1295, Marco Polo returned to Venice and became involved in the conflict between his city and Genoa for mercantile hegemony. It seems that in 1298, when he took part, as sopracomite in command of a galley, in the naval battle of Curzola, he was captured by the Genoese. Thus he ended up in prison, where he met the writer Rustichello of Pisa, to whom he narrated his astonishing voyage to the Far East. His account, written in the late 13th century, is the most exciting voyage ever narrated.
It has been followed by numerous navigators and cosmographers such as Juan Sebastián Elcano and Alonso de Chaves. But regardless of these grandiose consequences, which Marco Polo could not have foreseen, there remains, in addition to the veneration of the Chinese and Japanese for having revealed the Western world to them, the judgment of Alexander von Humboldt when he declared him “the greatest traveler of all times and of all countries”.
The book of ser marco p
The anecdote reveals Europe’s ignorance of the Far East, an ignorance that explains why, despite the time that has elapsed since the Venetian traveler visited those places, it was still believed that the keys to decipher the mysteries of Asia were to be found in the Milione. Not for nothing did his news appear on all the maps of the time, together with the most recent discoveries. In fact, with each shipment of spices, silks and precious stones, reports would arrive that would gradually put an end to the fantasy or legendary elements, introduced either by Polo himself or by the copyists and translators of his book, and which had so delighted his readers. The valleys of diamonds guarded by fearsome serpents, the giant rubies, the monstrous cinquefoils or the men with tails would be relegated to ever more distant regions.
Many of Toscanelli’s ideas were neither so new nor so original: they already appeared in the world maps of the Catalan school, in several Italian portolanos and in the chart of Fra Mauro [1459], and the concept of the sphericity of the Earth was a generally accepted principle in the 15th century.