Marco Polo and the Marvels of the World

Courage can bear a man across oceans. Humility can bear him to greatness.

A Map of Marco Polo's Voyages & Travels in the 13th Century through a great Part of Asia, all Tartary, the East India Islands & Part of Africa, unknown cartographer, 1744

What is a ‘long’ journey? Today we express curiosity when a friend spends a week abroad. We marvel at a month, while a year? Why, it is a quasi-religious experience.

Yet Marco Polo, the ultimate adventurer of the West, operated on a different relativity. For when he returned to Venice in 1295, laden with the jewels of Asia and pearls of wisdom, almost a quarter of a century had passed since he had set forth from the safety of home, as a boy of seventeen.

Not seeing his father until he was fifteen years old, we might say that Marco Polo had the worst possible preparation for such an undertaking. Alternatively, we might consider it the best — for when his father Niccolò Polo and uncle Maffeo Polo returned to Venice in 1269, they did so from quite the business trip.

Indeed, following mercantile years in Constantinople, the then capital of the Latin Empire, the demands of commerce had borne Marco’s father and uncle to the distant reaches of Asia, and the court of the most powerful man on Earth — Kublai, the Khagan, or Great Khan, of All the Mongols.

The Mission of Asia

“The Polo brothers and Marco leaving Venice”, from Le livre des Merveilles du Monde, unknown artist, 15th century

Strictly speaking, it was not sentiment that had lured the Polo brothers back to Venice, but the command of the Khagan, a curious man intrigued by the many faiths of this world, and who desired to know more of distant Christendom. Having befriended the Venetians, he asked them to bear word to the Pope, that he might dispatch to Asia one hundred men of the cloth, and a drop of the oil which burned in Jerusalem before the Sepulchre of Christ.

The timing was ill. Niccolò and Maffeo arrived in Acre on the Mediterranean shore to learn from the prelate Teobaldo Visconti that Pope Clement IV was dead, and that a vote was underway to choose his successor. The Polo brothers decided to take the opportunity to visit their family in Venice, but little did they know that they were in the midst of the longest Papal conclave in history.

Indeed, so tortured were the ballots taken in Viterbo that this election gave rise to the term conclave (from the Latin cum clave, ‘with key’), when out of sheer desperation, the electors were locked indoors and their supplies limited in the hope it would accelerate the result.

Come 1271, with conclave still ongoing, the impatient brothers desired to keep the Great Khan waiting no more, and departed the Venetian lagoon. Only this time, out of a desire to reconnect with the son he had never known, or else to train him in the mercantile ways, Niccolò Polo took his son Marco with them…