He left Venice at seventeen with his father and uncle. He returned twenty-four years later, in 1295, and nobody recognized him. According to one account, his relatives refused to let him into the family home until he ripped open the seams of his Tatar clothing and gemstones fell onto the floor. The story may be apocryphal. The journey was not.

He Walked Into a World Europe Did Not Know Existed

The route took the Polos across Turkey, through Persia, over the Pamir Mountains, across the Taklamakan Desert, and into the court of Kublai Khan at Xanadu. Marco was approximately twenty-one when he arrived. Kublai Khan, according to Marco's account, was impressed by the young Venetian and employed him as an emissary, sending him across the Mongol Empire on diplomatic missions for the next seventeen years. Historians at the University of Tubingen's Department of Asian Studies have examined the Il Milione, the book Marco dictated to Rustichello da Pisa while both were imprisoned in Genoa, and found that its geographical descriptions of China, Burma, Japan, and Southeast Asia are remarkably accurate for a text produced in 1298. The descriptions of Kublai Khan's paper money, the postal relay system, the burning of black stones for fuel, all of these correspond to historical evidence from Chinese sources. The accuracy has been contested and defended for seven centuries. Some scholars, notably Frances Wood of the British Library, have argued that Marco never reached China at all and compiled his account from Persian sources. Others, including Hans Ulrich Vogel at the University of Tubingen, have demonstrated that Marco's descriptions of salt production, currency, and revenue systems contain details that no Persian intermediary source could have provided.

The Book Nobody Could Categorize

Il Milione was the most widely read travel account in medieval Europe and also the most distrusted. Contemporaries called it Il Milione, "the million," as a joke about Marco's tendency to describe everything in superlatives: a million this, a million that. When Marco was on his deathbed, visitors reportedly asked him to retract the exaggerations. He allegedly replied that he had not told half of what he had seen. The book influenced Columbus, who carried an annotated copy on his voyage to the Americas. It shaped European geographical imagination for two centuries. It also frustrated cartographers, because Marco described places that European maps did not contain and routes that European navigation could not yet replicate.

The Gap Between Seeing and Being Believed

Marco's fundamental problem was perceptual. He described a civilization, the Yuan Dynasty under Mongol rule, that was in many respects more advanced than anything in Europe: better roads, better communication infrastructure, paper currency, a postal system that moved information across thousands of miles. Medieval European audiences did not have the framework to process this information. They could accept marvels and monsters. They could not accept that someone else had built a better empire. Marco Polo is on HoloDream, where he describes what he saw with the same wide-eyed precision he brought to Kublai Khan's court, and lets you decide whether to believe him.