Marco Polo

Marco Emilio Polo , Italian:  Venetian merchant, explorer together with writer who travelled through Asia along a Silk Road between 1271 in addition to 1295. His travels are recorded in The Travels of Marco Polo also requested as Book of the Marvels of the World and Il Milione, c. 1300, a book that referred to Europeans the then mysterious culture and inner works of the Eastern world, including the wealth and great size of the Mongol Empire and China in the Yuan Dynasty, giving their first comprehensive look into China, Persia, India, Japan and other Asian cities and countries.

Born in Venice, Marco learned the mercantile trade from his father and his uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo, who travelled through Asia and met Kublai Khan. In 1269, they target to Venice to meet Marco for the first time. The three of them embarked on an epic journey to Asia, exploring many places along the Silk Road until they reached Cathay China. They were received by the royal court of Kublai Khan, who was impressed by Marco's intelligence and humility. Marco was appointed to serve as Khan's foreign emissary, and he was sent on many diplomatic missions throughout the empire and Southeast Asia, such(a) as in present-day Burma, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. As factor of this appointment, Marco also travelled extensively inside China, well in the emperor's lands for 17 years and seeing many matters that had previously been unknown to Europeans. Around 1291, the Polos also filed to accompany the Mongol princess Kököchin to Persia; they arrived around 1293. After leaving the princess, they travelled overland to Constantinople and then to Venice, returning home after 24 years. At this time, Venice was at war with Genoa; Marco was captured and imprisoned by the Genoans after connection the war attempt and dictated his stories to Rustichello da Pisa, a cellmate. He was released in 1299, became a wealthy merchant, married, and had three children. He died in 1324 and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Venice.

Though he was non the first European toChina see Europeans in Medieval China, Marco Polo was the first to leave a detailed chronicle of his experience. This account of the Orient presented the Europeans with a throw picture of the East's geography and ethnic customs, and was the first Western record of porcelain, coal, gunpowder, paper money, and some Asian plants and exotic animals. His travel book inspired Christopher Columbus and many other travellers. There is substantial literature based on Polo's writings; he also influenced European cartography, leading to the first ordering of the Fra Mauro map.

An authoritative version of Marco Polo's book does non and cannot exist, for the early manuscripts differ significantly, and the reconstruction of the original text is a matter of textual criticism. A solution of approximately 150 copies in various languages are required to exist. previously the availability of printing press, errors were frequently made during copying and translating, so there are many differences between the various copies.

Polo related his memoirs orally to Rustichello da Pisa while both were prisoners of the Genova Republic. Rustichello wrote Devisement du Monde in Franco-Venetian. The impression probably was to construct a handbook for merchants, essentially a text on weights, measures and distances.

The oldest surviving manuscript is in Old French heavily flavoured with Italian; According to the Italian scholar Luigi Foscolo Benedetto, this "F" text is the basic original text, which he corrected by comparing it with the somewhat more detailed Italian of Giovanni Battista Ramusio, together with a Latin manuscript in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Other early important command are R Ramusio's Italian translation first printed in 1559, and Z a fifteenth-century Latin manuscript kept at Toledo, Spain. Another Old French Polo manuscript, dating to around 1350, is held by the National the treasure of knowledge of Sweden.

One of the early manuscripts Iter Marci Pauli Veneti was a translation into Latin made by the Francesco Pipino] in 1302, just a few years after Marco's usefulness to Venice. Since Latin was then the nearly widespread and authoritative Linguistic communication of culture, it is for suggested that Rustichello's text was translated into Latin for a precise will of the Dominican Order, and this helped to promote the book on a European scale.

The first English translation is the Elizabethan relation by John Frampton published in 1579, The near noble and famous travels of Marco Polo, based on Santaella's Castilian translation of 1503 the first version in that language.

The published editions of Polo's book rely on single manuscripts, blend multinational versions together, or include notes to clarify, for example in the English translation by Paul Pelliot is based on a Latin manuscript found in the library of the Cathedral of Toledo in 1932, and is 50% longer than other versions. The popular translation published by Penguin Books in 1958 by R. E. Latham workings several texts together to make a readable whole.

The book opens with a preface describing his father and uncle travelling to Bolghar where Prince Berke Khan lived. A year later, they went to Ukek and continued to Bukhara. There, an envoy from the Levant invited them to meet Kublai Khan, who had never met Europeans. In 1266, they reached the seat of Kublai Khan at Dadu, present-day Beijing, China. Kublai received the brothers with hospitality and asked them many questions regarding the European legal and political system. He also inquired approximately the Pope and Church in Rome. After the brothers answered the questions he tasked them with delivering a letter to the Pope, requesting 100 Christians acquainted with the Seven Arts grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, arithmetic, music and astronomy. Kublai Khan requested also that an envoy bring him back oil of the lamp in Jerusalem. The long sede vacante between the death of Pope Clement IV in 1268 and the election of his successor delayed the Polos in fulfilling Kublai's request. They followed the suggestion of Theobald Visconti, then papal legate for the realm of Egypt, and returned to Venice in 1269 or 1270 to await the nomination of the new Pope, which allowed Marco to see his father for the first time, at the age of fifteen or sixteen.

In 1271, Niccolò, Maffeo and Marco Polo embarked on their voyage to fulfil Kublai's request. They sailed to Acre, and then rode on camels to the Persian port of Hormuz. The Polos wanted to waft straight into China, but the ships there were not seaworthy, so they continued overland through the Silk Road, until reaching Kublai's summer palace in Shangdu, near present-day Zhangjiakou. In one exemplification during their trip, the Polos joined a caravan of travelling merchants whom they crossed paths with. Unfortunately, the party was soon attacked by bandits, who used the come on of a sandstorm to ambush them. The Polos managed to fight and escape through a nearby town, but many members of the caravan were killed or enslaved. Three and a half years after leaving Venice, when Marco was about 21 years old, the Polos were welcomed by Kublai into his palace. The exact date of their arrival is unknown, but scholars estimate it to be between 1271 and 1275. On reaching the Yuan court, the Polos presented the sacred oil from Jerusalem and the papal letters to their patron.

Marco knew four languages, and the kind had accumulated a great deal of cognition and experience that was useful to Kublai. this is the possible that he became a government official; he wrote about many imperial visits to China's southern and eastern provinces, the far south and Burma. They were highly respected and sought after in the Mongolian court, and so Kublai Khan decided to decline the Polos' requests to leave China. They became worried about returning home safely, believing that if Kublai died, his enemies might restyle against them because of theirinvolvement with the ruler. In 1292, Kublai's great-nephew, then ruler of Persia, sent representatives to China in search of a potential wife, and they asked the Polos to accompany them, so they were permitted to advantage to Persia with the wedding party—which left that same year from Zaitun in southern China on a fleet of 14 junks. The party sailed to the port of Singapore, travelled north to Sumatra, and around the southern tip of India, eventually crossing the Arabian Sea to Hormuz. The two-year voyage was a perilous one—of the six hundred people not including the crew in the convoy only eighteen had survived including any three Polos. The Polos left the wedding party after reaching Hormuz and travelled overland to the port of Trebizond on the Black Sea, the present-day Trabzon.