Marco Polo
Learn about Marco Polo — the Venetian merchant whose travels to China and account of Kublai Khan's court shaped European imaginations of the East for centuries.
Marco Polo (1254–1324 CE) was a Venetian merchant whose account of his travels to China became the most influential travel narrative in European history. Whether his claims are entirely accurate has been debated for seven centuries, but the impact of his book — Il Milione, known in English as The Travels of Marco Polo — is beyond question.
According to his account, Marco traveled with his father and uncle along the Silk Road to the court of Kublai Khan, arriving around 1275. He claimed to have served the Khan for seventeen years as a trusted official, traveling extensively across China, Southeast Asia, and India before returning to Venice by sea in 1295. His descriptions of China's vast cities, paper money, coal burning, postal system, and the splendor of the Khan's court seemed so fantastical to European readers that the book was nicknamed Il Milione — "The Million" — suggesting a million lies.
Yet much of what Marco described has been confirmed by Chinese and Persian sources. His account introduced Europeans to the concept of a civilization far wealthier and more sophisticated than their own — a revelation that fueled centuries of European interest in reaching the East. Christopher Columbus owned a heavily annotated copy of Marco Polo's book and was explicitly searching for the places Marco described when he sailed west in 1492.