Polo, Marco

POLO, MARCO. - One of the greatest Italian travelers, b. in Venice in 1254 to Niccolò, member of a commercial house that had a wide range of trade in the Levant, with a flourishing agency at Soldaia in Crimea. From there Niccolò, with a younger brother, Matteo, had undertaken, in 1261, a journey for commercial reasons into the countries of the lower Volga, that is, into the state then called the Golden Horde; the two had then passed on to Bukhara and had stayed there three years; then, having joined a mission that the Khan of Persia, Hülâgü, was sending to his supreme head, the Great Khan (of the Tartars), Qubilai, they had reached - crossing, by an itinerary never traveled by Europeans, central Asia - the capital Shang-tu. Qubilai, son of a Christian (not a Christian himself, as has sometimes been said), had received the two brothers very well and, when they took the road back, had furnished them with passports and also with a letter for the Pontiff, in which he requested European masters and workers and perhaps also some missionaries, but did not (as some have asserted) pay homage to the Pope, a thing incompatible with the mentality of an Asian monarch of that time.

The P., after three years spent on the return, were in Venice in 1269, where they remained two years, waiting for a new pope to be elected after the death of Clement IV. They took the road to Asia again in 1271, bringing with them Marco, who was then 17 years old. To M. P. is owed the narration of the subsequent journey, much longer, of the stay at the court of Qubilai in China and of the return; it is set down in the famous book usually called Milione; and from this one also learns that little which is known, and which has been summarized above, of the previous journey of Niccolò and Matteo. In his book Marco accompanies the description of countries known de situ with notices on other countries not visited, drawn from informants; the distinction is not always easy, and therefore the reconstruction of the itinerary presents certain uncertainties. From Lajazzo, on the Sea of the Levant, the travelers crossed part of Armenia as far as Mosul and from there headed for Hormuz, then (renouncing embarkation), they crossed all of Persia as far as Balj on the Amu, went around the Pamir to the north, descended into present-day Chinese Turkestan and after having, at the price of very grave hardships, crossed the Gobi, reached Chemenfu and then the new capital Khanbaliq near Beijing (1275). It seems that M. P. quickly won the sympathy of the Great Khan and was entrusted with various missions of trust in the vast Empire (Katay and Mangi, names used by P. to designate respectively northern and southern China), but what office he properly held and which regions he traversed is not entirely certain. Certainly he came to know through repeated visits all the central provinces, the richest and most fervid with life; to the south he pushed as far as Yun-nan, and there gathered information on Tibet, on Burma, etc.; to the north he went, perhaps with his uncle, as far as Kanciau, not far from the frontiers of Mongolia. A mission in Ciampa, present-day Cochinchina, is not excluded. Indirect information M. P. had on other more distant countries, and among them on Cipango (Japan). The stay in China lasted fully 17 years. The return of the P. took place by sea, they having been joined to a mission that was bringing to the Khan of Persia his future bride, chosen from among the maidens of his tribe. They embarked at the beginning of 1292 and, coasting along southern China and Indochina, stopped at Sumatra, visited the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, reached Ceylon and India where they made frequent stops; then, guided by now by Arab pilots, they arrived at Hormuz toward the end of 1293. From there, by land, the P. came out at Trebizond and finally returned to Venice in the course of the year 1295. The romantic particulars concerning the reappearance of the travelers in Venice, at the home of their relatives, are to be considered fantastic; and the tradition that they brought back from their long journey fabulous riches is also to be rejected; probably they had only gathered enough to live comfortably, so that from their ancient dwelling they moved to a palace, designated later by the name of "Cà Million". Moreover, on the remaining period of the life of M. P., who survived for about another 30 years, having died on 9 Jan. 1324, very little is known. The most salient episode is his imprisonment at Genoa in 1298-99; according to the most commonly accepted tradition, he would have been captured, with a galley he commanded, at the battle of Curzola. This period had, however, an exceptional importance, because in prison he dictated the account of his travels to a cellmate, Rusticiano or Rustichello da Pisa, who wrote it down in French. The French text has the title Les merveilles du monde; much more widespread are a version in Italian vernacular and one in Venetian dialect, which have the title of Milione, a title that, moreover, has nothing to do with the content, but is an appellation of its author, called in some documents Marcus Paulus Milioni, indeed a family appellation borne also by his father Niccolò (probably an apheresis of Emilione). A Latin version also had very great diffusion, made to be executed by the Dominicans of Bologna by a friar, Francesco Pipino, for the use of missionaries, around 1310, and therefore when M. P. was still alive.

The book of M. P. is a precious and inexhaustible source of information of every kind on the countries and peoples of the Levant, of southern Asia, of the Far East. Many regions were known to Europeans for the first time thanks to him; into some provinces of China no other European penetrated after him until the 19th century. Among the countries of which he speaks, but not from direct knowledge, there is also the Christian state of Abyssinia (Abesce), there is Somalia. Also on the beliefs, religious customs and rites of the Asian peoples, M. P. provides information of high interest. The fact is that his contemporaries considered him, at least in certain respects, a teller of tales or little less; but from the 16th century his fame was reestablished: the information provided in that century and the following by Jesuit missionaries in China consolidated the veracity of his accounts. Modern criticism has then by now fully recognized the value of the book, whose text has, however, undergone, through translations, transcriptions and various manipulations, alterations so complex that an arduous problem and not yet completely resolved is that of restoring a text as close as possible to the original. Enormous has been the influence of the book of M. P. among merchants, men of business and missionaries who followed in his footsteps along the routes of Asian Orient; China was opened by him to Catholic missionaries: Marco had barely returned twenty years before, when Oderic of Pordenone set out for the Far East. It is also known that the reading of the book of M. P., in the Latin version of friar Pipino, exercised a perhaps decisive influence also on the preparation of Columbus's project of reaching eastern Asia by the transoceanic route.

Roberto Almagà