December 22, 2008 • 13 mins
Marco Polo was an 11th-century Italian explorer famous for his extensive travels through China along the Silk Road, but it can be difficult to separate the truth from the fiction in his stories. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm at a church Gibson, joined by staff writer J
mccrat hey, kids, Marco, Hello, Marcallo. I actually know where
(00:24):
Jane is. And we're not in a pool. We're talking
about Marcus. We're talking about Marco follow because he is
our topic today and he's not only the namesake of
that very famous pool game, but he's also an established
author and traveler and some even say political advisor. Supposedly
that's right. And he was sort of like the original
(00:46):
Indian in Jones. He he lived back when, um, basically
Europe didn't know a whole lot about the world around
it and for point of references about the thirteenth and
fourteen centuries. And he grew up in Italy, in Venice specifically,
and his father Nicola, and his uncle Mafeo or Mafia,
I'm not quite sure how it's pronounced in a f
(01:07):
f e o um. They were travelers and traders. They
were very very shrewd businessmen, and they anticipated that there
is this changing political climate Constantinople that might enable them
to get in on the gem trade and so they
hopped on board, and they were able to make a
pretty good amount of money traveling back and forth along
the Silk Road, which was a series of trade routes
(01:29):
that connected merchants from Central Asia to Europe. That's right.
And unfortunately, because his father was such a traveler, his
father and his uncle uh, they were gone for much
of Marco Poe's life until he was about a teenager.
And uh. But when his father and uncle did come back, Uh,
they discovered that his mother was dead. Um. And but
(01:51):
they decided to have Marco continue the family business and
uh in sorts so um. He actually ended up joining
his father and uncle on their next back to China,
and the trip took them in total about twenty four
twenty five years. Historians debate that point, but seventeen of
those years were spent in the court of Kubla Khan.
(02:11):
And that was primarily the reason that they went back
to China, was because Kubla Khan had asked them to
bring back Christian missionaries and holy oil that have been
blessed by the pope, and of course the polos obliged.
I mean, how do you say you had to Kublican
That's right, although they weren't totally successful in bringing back
the religious men who were supposed to come back and
explain and defend Christianity to kahan Um. And when they
(02:35):
tried the the Pope actually assigned to Friars to come
with the polos Um and Uh, pretty soon after the
Polo set out, the Friars were like, forget it, I'm
heading back. This is too much for us. Well, it's
pretty intimidating because if you think about who Kuba Kan was,
you're at the Mongol leader and you remember probably another
famous Khan I've talked about before, Genghis Khan. And these
(02:56):
are people who essentially took over this part of China
and established theirn and fire and they were um formerly nomads,
and then they realized that if they wanted to have
a successful empire, they were going to have to be
rooted and stay in place and established themselves as merchants
and traders and craftsmen, and so that's exactly what they did.
So they had this very wealthy establishment. But Kubla Khan
(03:18):
was interested in learning more about Christianity and also just
business skills from outsiders. That's true, and it was pretty
fortunate considering what you're saying about how important they were
in their area, that they showed favor to the Polos.
They were, you know, they saw them as like, oh, special,
special Europeans are coming and we're going to favor you,
and you need to tell us about your culture and
(03:39):
and um have us learn about everything. And they really
like Margaret Polo, especially because he was young, and he
was bright, and he was witty, and apparently he was
really good at picking up languages, and he just really
appealed to Kubla Khan. And again this is debatable, but
he was either made a political advisor or some sort
(03:59):
of career low level government official buy Cublican, and he
was given a golden passport, which meant that he could
travel to the ends of China and back, that's right.
And because of that, he was able to see all
these things that no European had seen before and just
go to the ends of their of the of the
empire there and uh, that's why he was able to
write about so many amazing things later on. So he spent,
(04:22):
like we said, about seventeen years in Kubla Khan's court,
and we know that as he and his uncle and
father traveled from Venice back to China. They covered about
twenty four thousand miles and they would have passed through
the Middle East and Central Asia and then through China,
and supposedly there were a lot of new goods that
(04:42):
they discovered or that they saw for the first time
along the way. That's right, And legend is didn't he
take back pasta for the first time to introduce it
to Italy? And a lot of people todays think that, oh,
you know that originated in Italy. You know, they associate
spaghetti with with Italy. But um, but it was actually
more Marco Polo who introduced it from China. Isn't that wild?
(05:03):
So in addition to pasta, he saw porcelain and silk
and coal and his very first compass, and also paper money.
And paper money turned out to be a real biggie
because later on in his memoirs from people were debating
whether he had actually seen all of the things that
he said. Um, they were asking, well, you know, you
were in China, where are the mentions of the Great
(05:25):
Wall or of foot binding that practice, because he loved
those things out. Yeah, but he did mention paper money,
and later on Europeans did see paper money, and they realized,
oh well, then Marcot told us that this was coming,
and he was right. That's right. And even despite acquiring
malaria or some other serious illness along the way, he
was a hearty little trooper and once he got to
(05:48):
Kublican's court he was not restless per se. But he
wasn't just a sedentary European who came over to soak
in the culture. He was very active and communicating with
the people and traveling the land and trying to not
only discover what all was available out there, but also
to keep the trade, the Polos trade alive, that business.
(06:08):
That's true, and they were pretty successful. They were able
to get a lot of riches on the way. And
like you said earlier, like he picked up on languages
so well. Um, I read that the Khan actually sent
him on like fact finding missions when he went off
to the to the ends of the empire. And it
must have been a cool life, just like, hey, find
out this for me and this crazy fact and he
goes and he does it. I thought, pretty nice. I
(06:28):
kind of like a position of that today. Um. But
the thing is, after a while there was some unrest
that started brewing between the Mongols and the Chinese and
the Polos wanted too late because they saw that things
were about to get nasty. And not only that, but
Kublai Khan was getting kind of old, and once he died,
the Polos, you know, they had been shown favor with
(06:49):
with the Kublai Khan, but once he left, you know,
they would not be secured of any favor from the
next empire, definitely not. So they wanted to go ahead
and get out of town. But Copa consent, no, and
he was really insistent that they were going to stay.
And you know, what were they to do? They were outnumbered.
It was three against all the Mongols. But luckily fortune
(07:10):
smiled on them because a Persian diplomat came over and
said that Cohn's great nephew wanted a princess from the
Mongol tribe to marry, and so con agree to let
the Polos escort her back to Persia. So this was
their ticket back to Italy afterwards. Yes, and once they
get out of China, they went ahead and went on
(07:32):
him to Venice afterward. Yeah. I read one place. I'm
not sure if this is true, but actually, as soon
as they set foot on like Christian soil. Again, they
actually got robbed. The Polos got robbed of the riches
that they had spent you know, twenty years acquiring in China.
And that must have been terribly disappointing, I'm sure sure,
because they were representative of that culture and um, bringing
(07:55):
ideals to the Mongols. But at least he carried with
him what he saw there you go. And here's where
the story gets kind of fishy. And we've been saying,
you know, words like supposedly and debatably, and the reason
for that is because there are a lot of scholars
and historians, both contemporary to Marco Polo and today who
debate the authenticity of his accounts. And we should mention
(08:17):
that his accounts were titled The Description of the World,
or ultimately titled The Travels of Marco Polo. And these
were not slight books or a slight book whether it
was a pretty hefty ton and Marco Polo didn't write
it himself, that's right. He was actually imprisoned when he
got back to Italy, which um it happened because he
(08:39):
got involved in the battle between the Venetians and the Genoese.
And at this time, you know, before Italy was unified
or and everything like that. Uh, these were actually two
republics and they were rivals at the time. So he
was imprisoned by the Genoese. And while he was in prison,
he actually met up with a popular writer of the time.
He wrote romances and um, so he would dictate, would
(09:00):
dictate his what he saw in China's travels, and the
writer actually wrote down for him. And the writer's name
was rest Cello, and he was a member of I
think the French Court, and so he would have been
writing to entertain nobles, and so some people think that
he embellished market Pello stories and um. They were translated
(09:20):
first into French and then into I think a hundred
fifty different languages, or disseminated disseminated to a hundred fifty
different countries. And so you can imagine it's almost like
that game of telephone that you play when you're a child.
A lot of secret from one year to the next.
By the time you get back to the person who
originated the secret, it's been altered in somewhat and there's
no original manuscript for which to grouper back to. And
(09:43):
this is and this is even assuming that rosta Cello.
Actually Um wrote down faithfully everything that Polo said. It's
possible because he was such a you know, he was
a writer of romances, that he might have embellished things
that Polo said precisely. And so by the time I
got through with several um different letters and translators, the
story was not in its original form by any stretch.
(10:04):
But then market Polo later on his deathbed, he was
asked to retract the things that he had said, and
he commented, I only tell half of what I thought, right.
He stuck to his story, he did. And not only that,
he said, you know, if I had told you really
what I had seen, you guys wouldn't have believed me
anymore than you believe what I did tell you. And
that's true because you think about the fact that China
(10:27):
was such a mystery to the Europeans, not only with
that far away, but they were isolated by a treacherous
terrain and mountains and oceans, and they had no idea
what was going on over there except for the goods
that they saw come down. This it's true, and it
should you know, like Um sort of to defend Polo,
but also to explain maybe some inaccuracies in his story
was that he didn't talk about everything he saw, Like
(10:50):
everything he wrote in the book wasn't weren't things that
he personally saw, but he got secondhand descriptions of from
people he met there um and so if those were wrong,
he wouldn't have known. But he told his his side
of the story. Would he knew right? And whether or
not it is true all of the accounts, it forever
changed how Europe regarded China. It gave rise to the
(11:11):
first maps that you're made of of parts of Asia
and of China, and even influence later explorers like Christopher
Columbus who was trying to find the Orient based on
the descriptions and coordinates that marcat Polo gave, and in
fourteen two, I think we all know where he ended up.
That's right now, the Orient. So and one of my
favorite parts of the marcat Polo story is a little
(11:32):
bit um juicy and tawdrey and pulpy, really, because we
know from most accounts that he married a Venetian woman
named Donata and he had three daughters, but there are
some accounts or some legends rather that say he didn't
marry an Italian woman. He married a woman that he
met in Kubla Khan's court, actually his daughter how Dong,
(11:53):
and supposedly how Dong traveled with him and his uncle
and father and then returned with Marcot to Venice, and
she was ostracized by the people because she was so different,
so she would lock herself in her room and singing,
which was her only comfort. She had a beautiful singing voice.
And then we know that Marco came to be arrested,
and in this version of the story, he wasn't arrested
(12:13):
for leading uprising against the Genoese. He was arrested because
he'd married a Christian and the Catholic Church of an eyeballing.
It gets even more even more scandalous because then supposedly
his sister Lucia lied to how Dong and said that
he had died, and she was so upset that she
set her clothes on fire and hurled herself into the canals.
(12:35):
So if you're in Venice today, um, you can hear her.
This is a story there, it's a good story. Yeah,
you can hear her singing by the canal. Yeah, exactly that.
I'm actually on my way right now. So we're gonna
have to cut this short. The point being, you know,
we we don't know definitively whether or not mercant Polo's
accounts were true, and we don't know definitively all the
(12:56):
details of his biography. So we've done a quick history
of Marco Polo, and it only takes a click of
amounts to uh go to our website and learn about
anything from Marco Polo, history of China, or anything under
this one, even Genghis Khan, the man who started all
before before Kubla t That's on how stuff works dot com.
(13:17):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, isn't
how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think.
Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm at a church Gibson, joined by staff writer J
mccrat hey, kids, Marco, Hello, Marcallo. I actually know where
(00:24):
Jane is. And we're not in a pool. We're talking
about Marcus. We're talking about Marco follow because he is
our topic today and he's not only the namesake of
that very famous pool game, but he's also an established
author and traveler and some even say political advisor. Supposedly
that's right. And he was sort of like the original
(00:46):
Indian in Jones. He he lived back when, um, basically
Europe didn't know a whole lot about the world around
it and for point of references about the thirteenth and
fourteen centuries. And he grew up in Italy, in Venice specifically,
and his father Nicola, and his uncle Mafeo or Mafia,
I'm not quite sure how it's pronounced in a f
(01:07):
f e o um. They were travelers and traders. They
were very very shrewd businessmen, and they anticipated that there
is this changing political climate Constantinople that might enable them
to get in on the gem trade and so they
hopped on board, and they were able to make a
pretty good amount of money traveling back and forth along
the Silk Road, which was a series of trade routes
(01:29):
that connected merchants from Central Asia to Europe. That's right.
And unfortunately, because his father was such a traveler, his
father and his uncle uh, they were gone for much
of Marco Poe's life until he was about a teenager.
And uh. But when his father and uncle did come back, Uh,
they discovered that his mother was dead. Um. And but
(01:51):
they decided to have Marco continue the family business and
uh in sorts so um. He actually ended up joining
his father and uncle on their next back to China,
and the trip took them in total about twenty four
twenty five years. Historians debate that point, but seventeen of
those years were spent in the court of Kubla Khan.
(02:11):
And that was primarily the reason that they went back
to China, was because Kubla Khan had asked them to
bring back Christian missionaries and holy oil that have been
blessed by the pope, and of course the polos obliged.
I mean, how do you say you had to Kublican
That's right, although they weren't totally successful in bringing back
the religious men who were supposed to come back and
explain and defend Christianity to kahan Um. And when they
(02:35):
tried the the Pope actually assigned to Friars to come
with the polos Um and Uh, pretty soon after the
Polo set out, the Friars were like, forget it, I'm
heading back. This is too much for us. Well, it's
pretty intimidating because if you think about who Kuba Kan was,
you're at the Mongol leader and you remember probably another
famous Khan I've talked about before, Genghis Khan. And these
(02:56):
are people who essentially took over this part of China
and established theirn and fire and they were um formerly nomads,
and then they realized that if they wanted to have
a successful empire, they were going to have to be
rooted and stay in place and established themselves as merchants
and traders and craftsmen, and so that's exactly what they did.
So they had this very wealthy establishment. But Kubla Khan
(03:18):
was interested in learning more about Christianity and also just
business skills from outsiders. That's true, and it was pretty
fortunate considering what you're saying about how important they were
in their area, that they showed favor to the Polos.
They were, you know, they saw them as like, oh, special,
special Europeans are coming and we're going to favor you,
and you need to tell us about your culture and
(03:39):
and um have us learn about everything. And they really
like Margaret Polo, especially because he was young, and he
was bright, and he was witty, and apparently he was
really good at picking up languages, and he just really
appealed to Kubla Khan. And again this is debatable, but
he was either made a political advisor or some sort
(03:59):
of career low level government official buy Cublican, and he
was given a golden passport, which meant that he could
travel to the ends of China and back, that's right.
And because of that, he was able to see all
these things that no European had seen before and just
go to the ends of their of the of the
empire there and uh, that's why he was able to
write about so many amazing things later on. So he spent,
(04:22):
like we said, about seventeen years in Kubla Khan's court,
and we know that as he and his uncle and
father traveled from Venice back to China. They covered about
twenty four thousand miles and they would have passed through
the Middle East and Central Asia and then through China,
and supposedly there were a lot of new goods that
(04:42):
they discovered or that they saw for the first time
along the way. That's right, And legend is didn't he
take back pasta for the first time to introduce it
to Italy? And a lot of people todays think that, oh,
you know that originated in Italy. You know, they associate
spaghetti with with Italy. But um, but it was actually
more Marco Polo who introduced it from China. Isn't that wild?
(05:03):
So in addition to pasta, he saw porcelain and silk
and coal and his very first compass, and also paper money.
And paper money turned out to be a real biggie
because later on in his memoirs from people were debating
whether he had actually seen all of the things that
he said. Um, they were asking, well, you know, you
were in China, where are the mentions of the Great
(05:25):
Wall or of foot binding that practice, because he loved
those things out. Yeah, but he did mention paper money,
and later on Europeans did see paper money, and they realized,
oh well, then Marcot told us that this was coming,
and he was right. That's right. And even despite acquiring
malaria or some other serious illness along the way, he
was a hearty little trooper and once he got to
(05:48):
Kublican's court he was not restless per se. But he
wasn't just a sedentary European who came over to soak
in the culture. He was very active and communicating with
the people and traveling the land and trying to not
only discover what all was available out there, but also
to keep the trade, the Polos trade alive, that business.
(06:08):
That's true, and they were pretty successful. They were able
to get a lot of riches on the way. And
like you said earlier, like he picked up on languages
so well. Um, I read that the Khan actually sent
him on like fact finding missions when he went off
to the to the ends of the empire. And it
must have been a cool life, just like, hey, find
out this for me and this crazy fact and he
goes and he does it. I thought, pretty nice. I
(06:28):
kind of like a position of that today. Um. But
the thing is, after a while there was some unrest
that started brewing between the Mongols and the Chinese and
the Polos wanted too late because they saw that things
were about to get nasty. And not only that, but
Kublai Khan was getting kind of old, and once he died,
the Polos, you know, they had been shown favor with
(06:49):
with the Kublai Khan, but once he left, you know,
they would not be secured of any favor from the
next empire, definitely not. So they wanted to go ahead
and get out of town. But Copa consent, no, and
he was really insistent that they were going to stay.
And you know, what were they to do? They were outnumbered.
It was three against all the Mongols. But luckily fortune
(07:10):
smiled on them because a Persian diplomat came over and
said that Cohn's great nephew wanted a princess from the
Mongol tribe to marry, and so con agree to let
the Polos escort her back to Persia. So this was
their ticket back to Italy afterwards. Yes, and once they
get out of China, they went ahead and went on
(07:32):
him to Venice afterward. Yeah. I read one place. I'm
not sure if this is true, but actually, as soon
as they set foot on like Christian soil. Again, they
actually got robbed. The Polos got robbed of the riches
that they had spent you know, twenty years acquiring in China.
And that must have been terribly disappointing, I'm sure sure,
because they were representative of that culture and um, bringing
(07:55):
ideals to the Mongols. But at least he carried with
him what he saw there you go. And here's where
the story gets kind of fishy. And we've been saying,
you know, words like supposedly and debatably, and the reason
for that is because there are a lot of scholars
and historians, both contemporary to Marco Polo and today who
debate the authenticity of his accounts. And we should mention
(08:17):
that his accounts were titled The Description of the World,
or ultimately titled The Travels of Marco Polo. And these
were not slight books or a slight book whether it
was a pretty hefty ton and Marco Polo didn't write
it himself, that's right. He was actually imprisoned when he
got back to Italy, which um it happened because he
(08:39):
got involved in the battle between the Venetians and the Genoese.
And at this time, you know, before Italy was unified
or and everything like that. Uh, these were actually two
republics and they were rivals at the time. So he
was imprisoned by the Genoese. And while he was in prison,
he actually met up with a popular writer of the time.
He wrote romances and um, so he would dictate, would
(09:00):
dictate his what he saw in China's travels, and the
writer actually wrote down for him. And the writer's name
was rest Cello, and he was a member of I
think the French Court, and so he would have been
writing to entertain nobles, and so some people think that
he embellished market Pello stories and um. They were translated
(09:20):
first into French and then into I think a hundred
fifty different languages, or disseminated disseminated to a hundred fifty
different countries. And so you can imagine it's almost like
that game of telephone that you play when you're a child.
A lot of secret from one year to the next.
By the time you get back to the person who
originated the secret, it's been altered in somewhat and there's
no original manuscript for which to grouper back to. And
(09:43):
this is and this is even assuming that rosta Cello.
Actually Um wrote down faithfully everything that Polo said. It's
possible because he was such a you know, he was
a writer of romances, that he might have embellished things
that Polo said precisely. And so by the time I
got through with several um different letters and translators, the
story was not in its original form by any stretch.
(10:04):
But then market Polo later on his deathbed, he was
asked to retract the things that he had said, and
he commented, I only tell half of what I thought, right.
He stuck to his story, he did. And not only that,
he said, you know, if I had told you really
what I had seen, you guys wouldn't have believed me
anymore than you believe what I did tell you. And
that's true because you think about the fact that China
(10:27):
was such a mystery to the Europeans, not only with
that far away, but they were isolated by a treacherous
terrain and mountains and oceans, and they had no idea
what was going on over there except for the goods
that they saw come down. This it's true, and it
should you know, like Um sort of to defend Polo,
but also to explain maybe some inaccuracies in his story
was that he didn't talk about everything he saw, Like
(10:50):
everything he wrote in the book wasn't weren't things that
he personally saw, but he got secondhand descriptions of from
people he met there um and so if those were wrong,
he wouldn't have known. But he told his his side
of the story. Would he knew right? And whether or
not it is true all of the accounts, it forever
changed how Europe regarded China. It gave rise to the
(11:11):
first maps that you're made of of parts of Asia
and of China, and even influence later explorers like Christopher
Columbus who was trying to find the Orient based on
the descriptions and coordinates that marcat Polo gave, and in
fourteen two, I think we all know where he ended up.
That's right now, the Orient. So and one of my
favorite parts of the marcat Polo story is a little
(11:32):
bit um juicy and tawdrey and pulpy, really, because we
know from most accounts that he married a Venetian woman
named Donata and he had three daughters, but there are
some accounts or some legends rather that say he didn't
marry an Italian woman. He married a woman that he
met in Kubla Khan's court, actually his daughter how Dong,
(11:53):
and supposedly how Dong traveled with him and his uncle
and father and then returned with Marcot to Venice, and
she was ostracized by the people because she was so different,
so she would lock herself in her room and singing,
which was her only comfort. She had a beautiful singing voice.
And then we know that Marco came to be arrested,
and in this version of the story, he wasn't arrested
(12:13):
for leading uprising against the Genoese. He was arrested because
he'd married a Christian and the Catholic Church of an eyeballing.
It gets even more even more scandalous because then supposedly
his sister Lucia lied to how Dong and said that
he had died, and she was so upset that she
set her clothes on fire and hurled herself into the canals.
(12:35):
So if you're in Venice today, um, you can hear her.
This is a story there, it's a good story. Yeah,
you can hear her singing by the canal. Yeah, exactly that.
I'm actually on my way right now. So we're gonna
have to cut this short. The point being, you know,
we we don't know definitively whether or not mercant Polo's
accounts were true, and we don't know definitively all the
(12:56):
details of his biography. So we've done a quick history
of Marco Polo, and it only takes a click of
amounts to uh go to our website and learn about
anything from Marco Polo, history of China, or anything under
this one, even Genghis Khan, the man who started all
before before Kubla t That's on how stuff works dot com.
(13:17):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, isn't
how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think.
Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.
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Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!