Marco Polo

Marco Polo was born in Venice around 1254, into a family of merchants who traded across the known world. His father, Niccolò, and his uncle Maffeo had already journeyed deep into Asia and come back with tales of the court of the Mongols. So when they set out east again in 1271, they took the teenage Marco with them. He was perhaps seventeen years old, and the journey ahead would swallow the whole of his youth.

The road was the network of caravan routes later generations would call the Silk Road — months of mountains, deserts and trading cities, of danger, sickness and slow, grinding distance. After three or four years of travel, the Polos finally reached the realm of Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan and Mongol emperor of China. They had crossed half the world to stand in his court.

Kublai Khan, it is said, was charmed by the sharp young Venetian. Marco was clever, observant, and good with languages, and the emperor reportedly took him into his service. For something like seventeen years Marco stayed in the East, sent out as an envoy across the empire and bringing back reports of the provinces, the cities and the customs he found there.

After roughly twenty-four years away, Marco came home to a Venice that barely remembered him. He had returned a wealthy man, but his greatest fortune was the one he could not yet see: the story locked inside his head. That story might have stayed there, half-told at dinner tables, had fate not intervened in a strange way.

Venice was at war with the rival city of Genoa, and Marco was captured and thrown into a Genoese prison. There he met a fellow prisoner named Rustichello da Pisa, a writer of romances. To pass the long, idle months, Marco dictated his travels and Rustichello wrote them down. The result was a book Europe came to know as The Travels of Marco Polo — also called Il Milione, "The Million."

It was a sensation. In an age before printing, the manuscript was copied by hand and spread across Europe, describing marvels its readers could scarcely believe: a city of impossible size and wealth, stones that burned (coal), and money made of paper. For generations it was the West's richest window onto the East. Two centuries later, a Genoese sailor named Christopher Columbus owned a copy, scribbled notes in its margins, and sailed west hoping to reach the very lands Marco had described. The book had become a map of the imagination.

Here the story turns into an argument that has lasted seven hundred years. Almost from the start, people were sceptical. The book was so full of riches and round numbers that the nickname Il Milione may have been half a joke — Marco of the Million Lies. On his deathbed in 1324, friends are said to have begged him to take back his tall tales. He reportedly refused, insisting he had not told the half of what he saw.

Modern doubters have pressed the case further. If Marco truly spent years criss-crossing China, why does his book never mention the Great Wall? Why no tea, no chopsticks, no Chinese writing, no foot-binding — the very things a European could hardly have missed? Some scholars argue he never reached China at all, and instead pieced his account together from Persian and Arabic guidebooks picked up at trading posts nearer home.

Yet the case for Marco is strong too. He describes paper money, the burning of coal, and the workings of Mongol salt taxes and currency with a precision that fits the records remarkably well — details a stay-at-home faker would have struggled to invent. So the debate runs on. He must have seen something extraordinary to describe it so exactly; yet he can't have got everything right, or remembered it all perfectly, decades later in a prison cell. Perhaps the truth is the most human answer of all: a real journey, a real wonder, and a storyteller who could never quite resist making a good tale better.