Marco Polo

Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant traveler whose late-13th-century journey through Mongol-ruled Asia — and his subsequent dictated travelogue Il Milione (Italian for "The Million," also known in English as The Travels of Marco Polo) — introduced medieval Europe to medieval China and became one of the most-influential books of the late medieval period. He was born Marco Polo in 1254, most likely in the Republic of Venice (which then included Korčula, Croatia — both cities have claimed him historically). His father Niccolò Polo and uncle Maffeo Polo were Venetian merchants who had already undertaken one Asian journey before Marco was born.

The defining family journey began in 1271 when Marco was 17. Marco, his father, and his uncle traveled overland from Venice to the court of Kublai Khan, the Mongol Emperor of China, on a four-year journey that took them through the Holy Land, Persia, the Pamir Mountains, the Taklamakan Desert, and finally to Khanbaliq (modern Beijing) where they arrived around 1275. Marco served at Kublai Khan's court for the next 17 years (1275–1292) — by his own account, working as a special envoy and administrator who traveled extensively across the Mongol Empire on the Khan's business.

The Polos finally departed China in 1292, traveling first to Persia by sea and then overland back to Venice — arriving home around 1295 after a 24-year absence. Marco was captured during a 1298 Venice-Genoa naval battle and imprisoned for several months, during which he dictated his travelogue to his fellow prisoner, the romance writer Rustichello da Pisa. The resulting book — composed in Old French as Le Livre des Merveilles du Monde ("The Book of the Wonders of the World") — became one of the most-widely-circulated books of the late medieval period, with over 150 surviving manuscript copies.

The historicity of Polo's account has been continuously debated by historians. Some elements (Chinese paper money, coal-burning, the use of asbestos, the Mongol postal system, the city of Hangzhou) match later historical and archaeological evidence; other expected elements (the Great Wall of China, tea-drinking, Chinese characters, foot-binding) are conspicuously absent. He died on January 8 or 9, 1324, in Venice, at age 69 or 70.

His name Marco is the Italian form of Mark, from the Latin Marcus, an old Roman family name. Marco has been continuously among the most-popular Italian-American and Spanish-American boys' names for decades.