Am sure most of you have played the game, Marco Polo, which is not very different from Blindman’s Buff. The airport at Venice is named “Marco Polo Venice” after its famous son.
In 1261, Marco Polo was a lad of six when his father and uncle set out eastward from Venice. The two travellers went all the way to Beijing where they were received well by the famous Mongol ruler and Chinese emperor Kublai Khan, the grandson of Ghenghis Khan who’d conquered North-East Asia. A year passed, Kublai Khan sent the two Italians on their way with a letter to Pope Clement IV requesting for 100 priests to teach people about Christianity and oil from the lamp at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
Adventure
By the time his father returned from his travels, Marco was a teenager and had sadly enough lost his mother. He was barely 17 when Nicolo Polo took his son along with his brother on his second trip to Cathay. When they came to the unrelenting sands of the Gobi desert, Marco thought it could easily take a year to cross it. “There is nothing at all to eat,” he cried.
It took three and a half years to reach Cambaluc or Khanbalig meaning the city of Khan. In his account of the life of Mongols, Marco Polo seems taken aback by the way in which women got saddled with the lion’s share of work. The men did not bother about anything other than hunting, warfare and falconry, he noted.
A linguist who knew four languages, Marco was a big hit with the Emperor who sent him on special missions to places like Burma and India. Coal, imperial post and paper currency were things of wonder for the Italian explorer. According to him, coal was “stones that burned like logs”, and saved greatly on firewood.
The English poet Samuel Coleridge wrote a poem titled, “Kubla Khan”. The inspiration was Marco Polo’s account of the stately pleasure dome in Xanadu or Shang-du built in the 13th century by Kublai Khan. Marco Polo described it, “as the greatest palace that ever was”.
The Polos —father, brother and son — stayed in the Great Khan’s court for 17 years and had become wealthy. The sea journey back home took two years. Marco married Donata Badoer and had three daughters.
After three years of his return Marco Polo commanded a ship in a battle against Genoa and was captured and put behind bars. It was his fellow-mate in prison, Rustichello of Pisa, a writer himself, who persuaded Marco to record his 24-year trip outside Venice. Thus came out The Travels of Marco Polo . The impact of the book on contemporary Europe was tremendous. The book was printed in French, Italian and Latin.
But the book was also referred to as The Million Lies because few believed his stories to be true! For one thing, though he had travelled extensively in China, the book did not mention the Great Wall, women’s foot-binding or tea.
On his deathbed at the age of 70, Marco said: I have only told half of what I know, for I knew I would not be believed.
