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In the latest issue of Perceptive Travel there’s a review of the recent Marco Polo biography from Laurence Bergreen. This is an interesting guide to the life of the original world traveler, a Venetian who ended up going to Constantinople, Palestine, India, Indonesia, Burma, Vietnam, and along the Silk Road from Pakistan through Mongolia and China.
It’s hard now to fathom how difficult and dangerous this all was in the 1200s. Travelers could go for days or even weeks without seeing any settlement and the slightest flare-up could make a road impassable. It was nothing for a merchant to set out on a trip and be gone for years. Here are some of the oddities that came out of this exhaustive biography.
1) On their first trip into the Mongol empire, Marco’s father and uncle got stuck in Bukhara (now part of Uzbekistan) for three years waiting for the roads to become safe enough to travel onward. After meeting a Mongol ambassador, they traveled onward to Kublai Khan’s court—which took them another year.
2) When Marco set out with his father and uncle at the age of 17 to return with them to Khan’s court, the party got stuck in Badashkan (now in Afghanistan) for a year, while Marco recovered from some vague illness. Did he get hooked on opium and have to detox?
3) Marco reported that for a good long run, Kublai Khan got a new round of six concubines every three days. Some scholars believe the descriptions indicate that they were “trained in the ways of love” by the female members of the court before being ready for prime time.
4) It took nearly 4,000 years for the science of silk to make its way from China to Italy. It first went into production in Constantinople in 550, however, when a pair of monks appeared in the court of emperor Justinian ! with silkworms smuggled in their bamboo walking sticks—the first chance to break the Chinese monopoly.
5) In the city of Pagan, Marco discovered a repulsive and bizarre practice which he described in detail: tattoos. “Although Marco participated eagerly in many local customs, there is no indication that he submitted to this ordeal.”
6) The largest city in the world in Marco Polo’s time was…Quinsai in China, now Hangzhou.
7) His book was written with a ghostwriter, who probably added his own embellishments, plus the original was translated several times, so it’s hard to get at the definitive truth of every incident. Despite all the great tales, on his deathbed Marco supposedly said, “Friend, I have not written down the half of those things that I saw.”
There’s one passage in the book that offers him as an interesting role model for today’s travelers:
Marco never set out to discover a particular place, and never thought of himself as an explorer—“wayfarer” was the term he used to describe himself. His adventures occurred, and would continue to occur, by accident rather than design. He did not, and could not, plan; he lived by his wits and his talent for improvisation. A wanderer by temperament, he knew how to blend in rather than stand out.
[art from the traveltease t-shirt shop]
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