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In the year 1295 A. D., after an absence of twenty-four years,
Maffeo, Nicolo, and Marco Polo returned to their hometown of Venice,
Italy. The Polo trio looked like strangers to their fellow citizens:
they wore bizarre and ragged clothes and spoke in an accented tongue.
It is said that their own family neither recognized nor acknowledged
them due to their foreign appearance.
Marco, having left Venice as a young man of 17, was now 41 years
old. He had spent most of his life traveling in Asia. Having spent so
much of his life in the Orient, Marco must have experienced an extreme
culture shock upon returning to his homeland. While in Asia during the
voyages to and from China, Marco Polo saw vast numbers of different
lands and lifestyles. His Venetian upbringing gave him a unique
perspective on Asian civilization.
A few years after his return to Venice in 1295, Marco found himself
aboard a Venetian ship under the post of gentleman-commander during a
regional war between Venice and Genoa. The ship was captured by the
Genoese fleet and Marco consequently spent the next few years, until
May of 1299, in a Genoa prison. It was during this period that Marco
found the time to dictate, possibly with the help of notes taken during
his voyage, the story of his years abroad. Rustigielo, a citizen of
Pisa and fellow prisoner of Marco, took down Marco's story. The book
was dictated in prison and copied by hand, as the technology of mass
printing had not yet immigrated to Europe from China. As a consequence,
there exist today many versions, translations, and reconstructions of
the Rustigielo transcript.
Polo's book, entitled The Description of the World, covers the area
from Constantinople to Japan to Siberia to Africa. Because these
locations are told in the third-person, the exact route of Marco Polo
is not known. Instead of narrating the journey of the Polos, the book
contains historical observations and detailed descriptions of cultures
and geography. For this reason Marco Polo's accounts can be used to
re-examine the history of China.
Details that the young Polo observed included regional histories,
descriptions of cities, architecture, inhabitants, races, languages and
governments. Also described are peoples' different lifestyles, diets,
style of dress, marriage customs, rituals, and religions. There are
further accounts of the trading practices, crafts, manufactured
products, plants, animals, minerals, and terrain. Such a diverse and
detailed account of the lands that he journeyed earned Polo the name
'the father of modern anthropology.'
At first, the places that Polo's book tells of were too strange for
the Western mind to accept. Crocodiles and coconuts had never been seen
before by most Europeans, and were more easily ascribed to the product
of one Venetian's overactive imagination than taken as fact. Yet more
so than this, that the ethnocentric European mind refused to entertain
the notion that a civilization larger and more advanced than its own
existed seems the most likely reason for the rejection of Polo's story.
Europe had come to think of itself as the center of civilization, and
this belief was difficult to change. In addition to observations of
exotic wildlife, descriptions of the technological advancements of
Chinese civilization, such as the use of paper currency, were staunchly
rejected.
Far from being hailed as a daring adventurer and enlightening
explorer, the phrase 'It's a Marco Polo' came to denote an exaggerated
tale. Fearing for his historical reputation, friends of Marco Polo even
asked him to recant his story on his deathbed in 1323. Polo refused,
reportedly saying, 'I have not written down the half of those things
which I saw.' Indeed, several wonders of Chinese civilization, such as
the Great Wall, are not mentioned in Polo's book. He either forgot to
include things in his book, or knowingly omitted them, thinking that
they would not be believed.
Polo's book offered many geographic contributions concerning the
layout of the land of Asia. However, it took more than one hundred
years for Marco Polo's book to be accepted not as a work of fiction,
but as fact. It was not until the nineteenth century that his
itineraries were corroborated in detail. This eventual verification was
made possible by further explorations into Asia. Marco Polo's story
also came to encourage further exploration of the world: a well-read
edition of Marco Polo's book was taken by Christopher Columbus on his
first voyage to the New World.
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