Marco Polo was a liar. One scholar claimed that rather than going to China, he never went further east than Iran.
Marco was a prisoner of war, caught in a skirmish fighting his hometown’s biggest enemy. Marco was not a writer, but a spinner of tales. Mr. Marco Millions was a traveler, a merchant, an ambassador, an embellisher, and a subject of controversy.
Marco Polo was an adventurer, who had too many adventures to tell here. We can only scratch the surface of who he was.
The Bare Bones
Marco Polo was born in 1254 in the Republic of Venice. If you read my “D is for Doge” passage last year, you’d recall that Venice was a major world power at the time, responsible for the sack of Constantinople just a few decades earlier and one of the groups calling the shots in Europe. They “owned” ports on the Black Sea and elsewhere and had grown very rich ferrying French and Teutonic knights back and forth to the Crusades. So had the Genoese, another Italian seaport.
Marco’s father wasn’t there for his son’s birth because he was off in Constantinople with his brother, doing trade deals. Niccolo and Maffeo Polo decided to high tail it out of there because Constantinople was taken back from the Venetian puppets; the Polos went east–way east–out to the court of Khubilai Khan. They returned to Venice and persuaded 15-year-old Marco to go back with them, so Marco and family traveled the Silk Road once more, although their first stop was in Acre. Had I mentioned the Crusades?
Continue reading “M is for Marco Polo”
