Where would we be without Marco Polo?

Traveler brought back items, knowledge that spurred the Renaissance

Sandy Nelson | For The New Mexican

11/11/2007 -

MARCO POLO: From Venice to Xanadu

By Laurence Bergreen

Knopf
361 pages, $28.95
Marco Polo returned from his first business trip to find relatives occupying his home. But he and his father and uncle had been gone for 24 years, after all, and they looked and sounded like Asians, not the Venetians they had been.

Once their identities were confirmed, the three dazzled friends and family with tales of the mysterious lands and people they had encountered in their travels from Constantinople to Cambulac — the capital of Mongolia (the city we now call Beijing). Three years later, while imprisoned in Genoa for his role in the Battle of Curzola, Polo committed the stories to paper.

His memoir, Travels, was written 200 years before Europeans mastered moveable type (and 200 years after the Chinese invented it), so his book circulated by way of handwritten copies in numerous languages. "Eventually copyists created more than a hundred versions of Polo's account, and no two versions were alike," writes Laurence Bergreen in Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu.

Bergreen sorts through the resulting confusion to offer a colorful and accurate accounting of the man whose contributions to globalization and international awareness weren't widely appreciated until long after his death in 1324.

Marco Polo didn't even meet his father and uncle until he was 15, when brothers Niccolò and Maffeo Polo returned from a 16-year trading expedition that took them to the court of Kublai Khan. The grandson of Genghis Khan had inherited and expanded an empire built through bloody conquest, but for most of his life, according to Bergreen, he ruled it with a generosity and tolerance that impressed the Venetian merchants. The khan had recruited the elder Polos to be his ambassadors to the West; he guaranteed them safe passage home through his sprawling realm on the grounds that they would return as soon as possible. The brothers kept their promise — and on their second trip they brought 17-year-old Marco with them.

Bergreen revives Polo's original accounts of life along the ancient trade routes known collectively as the Silk Road and on the Gobi Desert and the high-mountain passes of Tajikistan. But Polo saved his greatest superlatives for the Mongols and their emperor — the leader of the 13th century world's largest superpower. For 17 years, the Polos were virtual servants of the khan, unable to leave Mongolia without his blessing. Marco's assignment to collect taxes for the khan took him throughout China and to Myanmar (Burma) and Vietnam.

Polo admired the khan's policy of accommodating the cultures, religions and practices of people he conquered even as he insisted on uniformity in the world of commerce: All his subjects used Mongolian money printed on paper, and the emperor worked feverishly without success to develop a common language.

Under Polo's keen eye, the "barbarians" of Western myth were shown as technological and social innovators who dominated cultures that were even more advanced. Bergreen takes an equally even-handed measure of his subject, showing Polo as more than the self-promoting embellisher his detractors have made him out to be.

"The significance of the inventions that he brought back from China, or which he later described in his Travels, cannot be overstated," Bergreen writes. "Paper money, virtually unknown in the West until Marco's return, revolutionized finance and commerce throughout the West. Coal, another item that had caught Marco's attention in China, provided a new and relatively efficient source of heat to an energy-starved Europe. Eyeglasses (in the form of ground lenses) ... became accepted as a remedy for failing eyesight (and) ... lenses gave rise to the telescope. ... Gunpowder, which the Chinese had employed for at least three centuries, revolutionized European warfare."

In short, Bergreen writes, "it is difficult to imagine the Renaissance — or, for that matter, the modern world — without the benefit of Marco Polo's example of cultural transmission between East and West."

Told with wit and insight, the story of Polo's journey still rivets nearly 800 years later. Perhaps that's because the world hasn't absorbed what Polo preached — that "commerce was the essence of international relations and that it transcended political systems and religious beliefs, all of which, in Marco's descriptions, are self-limiting."



Sandy Nelson is a freelance writer and former Santa Fe resident who lives in
southeast Utah.