The Travels of Marco Polo

I feel like my reading of this book has taken as long as Polo's travels! (Mostly, though, it was because I got sidetracked by the extensive footnotes & subsequent internet research on various topics found in Polo's book.)

Polo's tales are an eclectic mix of geography notes, merchant/business observations, descriptions of plants/animals/governments/cultural customs interspersed with strange & outrageous tales (many true) along with plenty of gossip & hearsay (plenty false). It's almost like a mix of a dry textbook, a National Geographic documentary, a royal edict, Twitter, & the National Enquirer stirred to create his unique story. The complete mish-mash of information & mix of the mundane with the extraordinary reminded me a bit of the show more structure & jumble of Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Even though some parts are repetitive or boring recitations of business/trading/government facts, there are a lot of gems & fantastic observations... enough to make me overlook the slower parts in favor of the rest of it. Five stars for Polo's sheer chutzpah in living his life large & telling about it so that, even today, we can still enjoy his amazing travels. show less

Interesting within some limits I’d say. As travelogue not all that interesting. As description of civilization and culture along the Silk Road, pretty interesting.

Going into this book, I brought some preconceptions that Marco Polo’s travels were susceptible to a degree of hyperbole and harmful ethnocentrism. But the early chapters traveling east to Cathay were fairly mild and more or less respectful. It’s when Polo travels through the South China Sea, into the Bay of Bengal, and the Arabian Sea (especially here) that you really see the ethnocentrism and outright revulsion at encountering peoples who are so culturally and racially different from Europeans. At times it gets downright direct in its prejudices and willingness to show more write off the unknown as evidence of weird barbarisms. I have no doubt that Polo encountered cannibalism … but that much? And people with the faces and tails of dogs … really? And unicorns (seriously!)? I don’t even want to repeat what Polo had to say when visiting Zanzibar.

And this is not to say that there wasn’t negativity in earlier travels across what is modern Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, and western China. Prejudices that are present in modern times, whether for Kurds, Uighurs, Armenians, and others appear to have deep roots because they show up in Polo’s travels as well. It’s enlightening at the very least and puts some of modern politics into a more detailed historical context with accuracy and objectivity in quotation marks, of course.

The chapters on Kublai Khan, however, are just downright fascinating. But there does appear to be a bit of what looks like hero worship in these chapters with a lot of hyperbolic representations of the Great Khan’ power – everything is huge from the wealth to the number of troops. Surely the Great Khan’s empire was big, but these flourishes about proportions seem more sensationalist than anything.

If those claims do something, however, they underscore the civic and political infrastructure that the Great Khan needed to control his vast empire. That starts with religious tolerance so long as people paid their levies. But then there is communication issues for which Kublai Khan seems to have established a pony-express style postal system. There are travel challenges for which he seems to be responsible for a number of engineering marvels (bridges, canals, etc.). And in this light, I think I understand why wealth and troop numbers appear comically outsized – it is a way of metaphorically explaining the Khan’s reach. Otherwise, how could he feasibly control (for example) the amount of diamonds taken out of a mine somewhere in his kingdom or control the number of pearls harvested from a body of water?

At the very least these chapters about Kublai Khan showed 13th century network power and it’s pretty fascinating for the purpose.

As far as travelogue goes, it got a little repetitive and mired in trivial details. Perhaps Europeans of the time were into that, but I thought that part made for some pretty dull reading at times. show less

This is one of the most famous travel narratives in history, and probably the most famous from Medieval Europe. Its significance in opening up educated European minds to countries and cultures way outside their experience can hardly be overstated ("what really seems to have shocked Marco’s audience was his detailed depiction of entire civilizations that were completely unknown to them. This was a world where express messengers sped letters by foot, horse and dog-sled across thousands of miles in a matter of days, and where banknotes were legal tender when paper was barely known in the West;") He re-opened up knowledge of Asia lost since before the rise of Islam and was the first Westerner to describe the existence of Japan. Of course, show more his account is also spiced with myths and legends about fabulous beasts such as gryphons and legendary figures such as the fabled eastern Christian ruler Prester John. Polo was inevitably affected by the assumptions of his time, for example in believing Christianity superior to all other belief systems, but nevertheless remains remarkably open to other cultures and experiences. I thought this was particularly evident in the chapter on India, one of his less well known journeys, which was less relatively less repetitive and censorious than some of the others. Despite the book's intrinsic significance and interest, it is very repetitive in places, with very similar or even near identical descriptions applied to numerous city states in what is now China, or the other territories in the vast and sprawling Mongol Empire (its founder Genghis Khan, the grandfather of Marco Polo's patron Kubhlai Khan, conquered more land than anyone else in history in founding the world's largest empire on a single land mass). He is very fond of stock phrases about idolators, paper money, subjects of the Great Khan, and cities having all the necessities of life in abundance. Rhetorical devices such as "What else shall I tell you?" and "Why make a long story of it?" pepper the narrative. All this said, we don't know exactly how much of this narrative was written by Polo himself, a combination of curious traveller and hard-headed businessman, or by his co-writer Rustichello of Pisa, a professional romance writer whom Polo met in prison in Genoa in the late 1290s, after Polo had been captured in the conflict between that city state and his home city of Venice. What we do know is that nearly all of the places Polo mentioned in his book have been identified and he undoubtedly undertook his travels as he said (some sceptics have occasionally doubted the fundamental truth of his account because of his errors or omissions). Rightly a landmark of European literature. show less

Marco Polo's travel tales offer an interesting medieval trader's view of Asia. A large part of his tale is devoted not to China proper but to the extended landbound journey there. The style reminds of a hasty Baedecker entry with a peculiar category set. Marco Polo usually mentions the locals' religions, their sexual mores (especially women offered for prostitution), strange animals and plants, trading goods and the relative price of silver and gold. Arriving in China during (and thanks to) the Mongol occupation, Marco Polo is in a unique position to witness both the Mongol rule and the underlying Chinese civilisation.

The early ethnographic description has lost nothing of their attraction since Christopher Columbus dreamed of the golden show more roofs of Zippangu. Having already read Italo Calvino's wonderful Invisible Cities, I appreciate the variations even more. show less

Who doesn't know what the Travels of Marco Polo are about? Controversy about the veracity of this book abound, but I will leave that for the scholars to debate. For me, the readability and peek into the past is what matters. It is quite readable and indeed even engrossing in portions. Other portions needed mighty skimming to keep me from quitting the book altogether.

Having a smartphone by your side is a wonderful way to read this. So many things sound utterly fantastic and as if they are part of the romanticism of the man Rustigielo who actually wrote the book while listening to Marco Polo, and yet, when you look into it with diligence, low and behold that thing does (or did) exist, or that custom was practiced and so on. Camelopard show more (giraffe) anyone? Or how about the descriptions of asbestos, a fabric which doesn't burn and is mined from the ground? This is full of delightful discoveries like that.

The illustrations from the Fourteenth century are quite comical in their representations of things like rhinoceros (pictured as a unicorn) and battles, and women dancing before an idol in India (fully gowned nuns with veils in the illustration). They make you stop and think though. Probably the artist had never seen or heard of such things before, so they had to pull from their own imagination what they would look like.

This is a book I am glad to have read, but don't expect it to be engrossing from cover to finish. show less

This was a lot of fun. Okay, okay, okay, okay - I’ll address the racist elephant in the room first: Yes, there are numerous digs at other religions, in particular the “Saracens” and “the idolaters” (the Buddhists don’t even get to be called by name), but even so he can’t disguise his wonder and marvel at the cultures he rubs shoulders with in his travels. Plus, these bits --could-- have been embellishments put in by his transcribers (he himself was illiterate) who weren’t nearly as worldly. Or they could have been his own words. Ultimately, what the reader has to remember is that he was just a dumb Venetian kid from the time of the Stupid Ages (as a European, he was blown away by the notions of paper money and regular show more baths), so ridiculous superstitions and idiot prejudices are to be expected. Not at all like our advanced and educated society of today ( show less

Fact or fiction? As once the most well-travelled man in the world, who would contradict Marco Polo? When, 750 years or so ago, he told the West of his travels through a thousand lands and cities between Venice and the farthest East. Of an Oriental city with 12000 bridges, where dogs are eaten, and paper used is money, of unicorns, enchanters, of Xanadu, and Kublai Khan who rules a third of the earth, exotic manners and customs, of deserts filled with spirits, and on an island in the Arabian sea colossal eagles that pick up elephants and dash them to the earth.
Part of the poetic license is excused by the nature of this work’s recording. While imprisoned, Marco Polo narrated his adventures to a famous travelling romance writer, show more Rusticello, who had the good fortune to be sharing the same prison, and jotted them down. So the stories were embellished along the way, and blame for any exaggeration can at least be shared.
As an historical record then it cannot all be taken at face value, however considering that there is no evidence of anyone from the West travelling as widely as Marco Polo did until about 100 years ago, this remains a unique document of considerable historical interest. Albeit one that must be interpreted with caution. For pure entertainment however, this is difficult to surpass as far as historical travel writings are concerned. There is also a lot of material of interest in terms of history, culture, anthropology, sociology, and politics. By reading this we see the many ways in which societies can be structured, and the many permutations, real or fictitious, that humans can create. show less