Summer. A swimming pool. Children in brightly colored swimsuits splash and play. Suddenly, rising above the sound of churning water comes a familiar call: “Marco!”
An instant later, voices echo back from every direction: “Polo!”
How did the name of a 13th-century Venetian traveler – who neither claimed the discovery of a new continent nor charted a groundbreaking sea passage – become synonymous with a game played in swimming pools across the Western world in the 21st century?
And why do we remember his name more readily than those of countless other travelers and explorers? There were certainly many of them. After all, the famous Silk Road did not owe its significance to a single man’s journey.
The answer lies neither in the extraordinary length of Marco Polo’s travels, nor in the marvels he witnessed (remarkable though they were). It has nothing to do with the pope’s role in his adventures, nor the beautiful Persian princess who appears in his story. It is not even found in the reliability of the information he recorded, which remains the subject of scholarly debate.
Rather, the answer rests on a gift that proved every bit as important as the journey itself: Marco Polo’s extraordinary ability to tell a story – and to commit it to writing.
It all began a generation earlier, when Niccolò and Maffeo Polo – Marco’s father and uncle – left their wives and children behind in the Italian city-state of Venice.
Over the centuries, various theories have been proposed about the birthplace of the world’s most famous traveler. Yet regardless of where he may have first seen the light of day, the city he truly called home – the one he longed for throughout his years of wandering, and the one he continually sought in the likeness of other cities – was always Venice, the beautiful city of his childhood, with its bridges and canals, its piazzas and palaces.
Niccolò and Maffeo did not set out in search of exotic adventures. They were merchants. After purchasing precious stones in Constantinople, they headed east to sell them. But regional wars and local conflicts made the return journey increasingly perilous, so they continued farther east, then farther still, until they reached the court of Kublai Khan, grandson of the great Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan, whose campaigns had once struck fear across Europe. Having defeated his younger brother in a struggle for succession, Kublai inherited leadership of the Mongol Empire and fulfilled his grandfather’s great ambition by completing the conquest of China.
Kublai Khan was an enlightened ruler. He not only embraced religious tolerance but was genuinely curious about other faiths and belief systems. European merchants and seafarers who reached Khanbaliq – the city that would become present-day Beijing – were welcomed warmly at his court.
Were Niccolò and Maffeo exceptional? It is hard to say. There may well have been dozens of merchants like them. Whatever the case, Kublai Khan appears to have been so impressed by their accounts of life in the Latin West – particularly its dominant religion – that he asked them to serve as his official envoys to the pope.
He entrusted them with a letter, known to us through the account of Niccolò’s son (who has yet to enter our story), in which he requested that the head of the Catholic Church send him one hundred learned Christians, well versed in the Seven Liberal Arts – grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
He also asked for oil from the eternal lamp that, according to the Polo brothers’ account, burned at the site of Christ’s Resurrection in Jerusalem. (Inevitably, it seems Jerusalem always finds a way into the story.)
The two merchant brothers returned west only to discover that there was no pope to receive them. Pope Clement IV had died in 1268, and the cardinals would spend nearly three years unable to elect his successor. They did, however, find a promising new companion for their travels. Niccolò’s son, Marco, who had come of age during his father’s absence and was now the venerable age of seventeen.
The brothers met up with Marco in Venice and set out once more for the East together. They stopped in the city of Acre in the Holy Land to meet the senior representative of the Church there, Teobaldo Visconti. They obtained his permission to travel to Jerusalem, gathered the requested holy oil, and recruited two Benedictine friars – the most that the Church’s representative in Acre could spare for their unusual mission. Then they resumed their journey eastward.
The monks quickly discovered that the name “Silk Road” didn’t quite reflect the rough on-the-ground experience of the journey, and they turned back, returning westward. Meanwhile, the man they had met in Acre, Teobaldo Visconti, was elected pope. He called them back. Now, as Pope Gregory X, he could address the proud ruler of the East directly in writing.
Newly equipped for the journey, they set out once again eastward, toward Kublai Khan.
And it is at this point, in fact, that Marco steps into the role of protagonist, replacing his father and uncle as the central figure in this extraordinary tale of travel.
Kublai Khan welcomed them once again with open arms into his magnificent palace, located in a city that seemed astonishingly advanced to ordinary Europeans – people raised with the assumption that the East was synonymous with ignorance and backwardness.
The Great Khan was deeply impressed by the holy oil that had traveled such a great distance, and by the pope’s letter. But he was equally intrigued by the new young member of the group, Marco, who was apparently sharp-minded and quick-witted, socially adept, genuinely curious, and remarkably adaptable.
Marco captured the Mongol ruler’s imagination so completely that, after only a few years, Kublai decided to appoint him as his official envoy for special missions throughout the vast Mongol-Chinese empire.
And so, the young Venetian began to “crisscross” the lands of the East, traveling far and wide. In his journeys, Marco Polo encountered sophisticated cities whose towers and bridges took his breath away, rural societies whose customs were both enchanting and unfamiliar, breathtaking natural landscapes, and animals that seemed to have emerged from the epic stories of his homeland. (Unfortunately, the “unicorn” he saw turned out to be gray, wrinkled, and entirely lacking in grace – since it was in fact a rhinoceros.)
Along the way, he appears to have carried out the emperor’s assignments with great success, as he was repeatedly sent on missions on Kublai Khan’s behalf. For seventeen years, the Polo family remained in Mongolia and China. Seventeen years of arduous journeys, unfamiliar places, and, through it all, a lingering longing for home.
Around 1292, despite the Great Khan’s objections, an opportunity finally arose for the Polos to return westward. They joined an escort mission accompanying a Mongol princess who was destined to marry a ruler of the Ilkhanid dynasty in Persia.
After an arduous and eye-opening journey across the southern half of the Asian continent, they returned to Venice in 1295, carrying great wealth with them. Marco himself, who had left at the age of seventeen was now a grown man with an impressive beard, almost unrecognizable to his friends and acquaintances.
The reception they received was somewhat puzzling. The three men were readily granted a place of honor among Venetian society, which valued wealth as highly as it valued noble titles.
Yet most of those who listened to Marco’s accounts – his mind overflowing with memories of his extraordinary travels – assumed that his stories could not possibly be true.
Surely, they thought, he was simply a man with an exceptionally vivid imagination. Some openly accused him of telling outrageous lies for sinister purposes, but most merely shook their heads with affectionate amusement. Before long, they began calling him “Il Milione” – a nickname that referred both to his immense wealth and to the “millions” of supposed falsehoods in his tales.
In his book (to which we will return shortly), Polo describes an attempt by himself, his father, and his uncle to convince the Venetians that their story was true. They gathered their relatives and friends for a lavish feast and then “poured” precious stones from the folds of their garments. The display may have been able to convince some of the skeptics – at the very least, it should have impressed everyone present, whether or not they believed the source of this almost pirate-like fortune.
Gradually, the Polos found their place once again in Venetian society. When war broke out between Venice and Genoa, Marco joined the Venetian fleet. He was captured and imprisoned.
It was, quite possibly, the most fortunate imprisonment in history.
While there in prison, he met a man named Rustichello, a writer from Pisa who specialized in composing and translating chivalric romances, including tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
Rustichello had two attentive, eager ears – and in the damp and dark confines of his cell, he had little else to do but listen to Polo’s extraordinary accounts of everything he had experienced. Slowly, the middling writer realized what a treasure had fallen into his hands, and he persuaded Polo to allow him to commit the story of his travels to writing.
Polo agreed. Although the commonly accepted view is that Rustichello composed the final version of the work that became famous throughout Italy, scholars generally believe that Polo himself was deeply involved in its creation.
The finished product was not merely a chivalric romance or an adventure tale, but a fascinating combination of breathtaking stories, something resembling a travel guide to the lands of the East, and detailed reports – some of which were later shown to be remarkably accurate – on systems of government, paper currency used in commerce, places, and rare animals he encountered during his journeys.
Thus, was born one of the great bestsellers of the Middle Ages – perhaps the greatest of them all, the account of Marco Polo’s travels to the East.
The original manuscript has not survived, and the many versions that did endure from later years are far from identical. Scholars have counted approximately 147 different variants. All of this created fertile ground for skepticism, conspiracy theories, and further mockery. Yet the very fact that we are still familiar with its contents many centuries later suggests that the story had the last laugh.
The original text was most likely written in a language known as Franco-Italian or Franco-Venetian, a literary French infused with Venetian and Pisan elements, as well as words absorbed from the East. French was, at the time, an international language of chivalric literature, making it a natural choice for a work intended to circulate throughout Europe.
The story spread its wings remarkably quickly, at least by medieval standards. It was translated into numerous languages, with each translator sometimes choosing to omit, add, or reshape parts of the narrative according to personal preference. As a result, countless versions of Polo’s adventures emerged. Yet, remarkably, the backbone of the story remained strong and unmistakable. The central figures, as well as the places Marco described in such detail, became familiar names throughout Europe, almost as recognizable as the heroes of the great mythological epics.
Roughly two hundred years after Marco Polo’s return to Venice, another European explorer, Christopher Columbus, took this very book with him when he embarked on his great voyage in search of the East. The information on which he hoped to rely, as we know, proved unnecessary for that particular journey, and the world lost the opportunity for a fascinating peer review of Marco Polo’s reports.
But the story was simply too compelling to remain confined to the place and time in which it was born. Years passed. Centuries passed. And from time to time, a new creator emerged to reinterpret – in poetry, prose, theater, and later also in radio and film – the captivating tale of the young European who became the envoy of the Mongol emperor who conquered China, and introduced the Western world to the wonders of the East.
Marco Polo himself, incidentally, abandoned during the second half of his life what once appeared to be an insatiable appetite for adventure. After his release from captivity, he married Donata Badoer, daughter of Vitale Badoer, who brought with her as a dowry one of the few things the Polo family still did not possess – a noble title. Marco and Donata had three daughters, and as far as we know, none of them followed in their father’s footsteps.
***
Over the coming month, the figure of Marco Polo will take center stage in children’s activities taking place at the National Library of Israel. As part of our summer program, we invite children and their families to embark on imaginary journeys across sea, land, and even outer space – and perhaps uncover a few of the universe’s secrets along the way.
At the heart of the experience, however, is the idea that a journey is more than simply traveling from one place to another. It is also a way of thinking, imagining, and creating. In this sense, the National Library is a wonderful point of departure for countless journeys. Knowledge has no end, and neither does human curiosity. Every answer opens the door to new questions, discoveries, and worlds waiting to be explored.
We invite children to join the explorers, adventurers, and trailblazers of history – and to set out with us on a journey toward infinity.
Please note: This event will take place in Hebrew.
