Marco Polo (1254-1324) is famous for going to China. His Description of the World, probably written in 1298, reported firsthand on
Mongolia, China, India, and Sumatra. To travel so far from Italy took dangerous months or years by foot, camel, or ship. The
Crusades had piqued European interest in Asian goods: silk, flax, and cloth-of-gold; silver, rubies, and lapis; dates, pistachios, and
spices. All these and more were traded along the ancient Silk Road, usually by Persians and other middlemen. In Polo's time, Italian
merchants had begun to go farther afield and handle more of the routes themselves, setting up trading posts in distant ports.
They needed information.
According to the prologue of the Description, Marco's father and uncle, Maffeo and Niccolo Polo, traded in Constantinople in 1260
and went on to trading posts on the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Eventually they reached Karakorum, the capital of the
Mongols, and met the great Kublai Khan. They were gone for ten years and didn't stay home for long. In 1271, they took young
Marco back to Karakorum with them. For the next seventeen years, he "never ceased to travel on special missions" for the Khan.
These were years in which the Mongol Empire fell into four parts, but Kublai's portion was still huge. It reached from the Black Sea
to the Pacific, and after 1279 it included all of China. Kublai sent Marco far and wide, and the homesick Polos did not see Venice
again until 1295.
Italy wasn't a single nation then, Venice was at war with Genoa-another Italian trading city-and Marco Polo soon became a
prisoner of war. In a Genoese prison he told his travel stories to a man named Rustichello, who made them a best seller. Polo's
Description was copied and recopied in a dozen languages, and it was still popular 200 years later-Christopher Columbus took a
copy to the Americas in 1492. But scribes and translators left some things out and added others; at least 143 versions appeared
between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. It's hard to know exactly what was in Polo's original version.
Polo seems to have said nothing about the Great Wall of China, or the practice of foot-binding, or the popularity of tea, and
Chinese records say nothing about Polo. Was he really there? Omissions don't prove that he wasn't. The Great Wall of China as we
know it was built in the sixteenth century, under the Ming Dynasty; earlier walls were less prominent and might not have
impressed Polo. He probably associated more with foreigners (including the Mongol conquerors) than with the Chinese
themselves, so he might not have seen much of foot-binding and tea-drinking. Or, if he did mention these things, copyists may
have dropped them from later manuscripts.
And while some details may have been dropped, others may have been added. Some versions of the Description make implausible
claims for the Polos: that they helped win the siege of Hsiang-yang, for instance, or that Marco governed Yang-chou for three
years. Did copyists add these details, or did the Polos overstate their own importance?
The Description is full of information about the mining of asbestos, the diplomatic and commercial contacts between Yuan China
What is a short summary of the authors argument ?