Dan Snow's History Hit - Marco Polo

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

You may have heard the many myths about the life and exploits of Marco Polo- was he really the one who brought ice cream and spaghetti from his travels on the Silk Road from the court of Kublai Khan, where he served as a diplomat? Almost as soon as he wrote his memoir, people doubted the wild stories of his travels across Europe and Asia.His life and myth are unravelled on today's podcast with Laurence Bergreen, historian and author of 'Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu' who followed in the footsteps of Polo, travelling the old Silk Road all the way to China, to see for himself if the stories of the great Venetian merchant were true…Produced by Mariana Des Forges, sound design and editing by Dougal Patmore.PLEASE VOTE NOW! for Dan Snow's History Hit in the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice category here. Every vote counts, thank you!Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!You can take part in our listener survey here.

On the small Mediterranean island of Korchula sits a walled city of the same name. It's a labyrinth of stone alleyways, shuttered windows and cobbled squares. You can smell the pine trees by listening to the sounds of the Adriatic lapping at the shore. Now, according to legend, the town on this Croatian island was founded, like quite a few other places, by a hero of the Trojan War, Aeneas, Prince of Troy. And it's now also thought to be the birthplace of the great 13th century Venetian explorer Marco Polo.

At least when you visit the local museum in the town, that's what they'll tell you. Korcula was then part of the Venetian Empire, that by the time Marco Polo was born in 1224 was a vast maritime power, spreading from northwest Italy, down the Croatian coast to Dubrovnik and beyond, all the way to Crete in the Aegean and even Cyprus. This city-state's empire became a flourishing centre of trade, sitting very strategically between northern and western Europe and the rest of the world, thanks to the intrepid adventures of merchants who penetrated deep into the Byzantine Empire and beyond, even arriving in the Far East. These were explorers like Marco Polo.

You'll have probably heard many of the myths around the life and exploits of Marco Polo. Was he the one who really brought ice cream and spaghetti along the Silk Road to the court of Kublai Khan, where he served as a diplomat? He must have had a cool box if he took ice cream. Almost as soon as he wrote his memoir, people doubted his wild stories of his travels across Eurasia, from Venice to China. So what's true? Today I'm joined by a historian who followed in the footsteps of polo traveling the old silk road all the way to china to see for himself if the stories of this great venetian merchant were true joining me now is lawrence bergreen on the podcast. Thank you for having me. Glad to

be here. Tell me, Marco Polo, he's born Venetian, but he's born in Croatia. How do we describe his or characterize his upbringing, his ethnicity, his nationality, if you like? Well, Croatia and Venice were almost the same. It was part of the rather small Venetian empire. Keep in mind that Italy at that point was not unified. It was a collection of city-states, Genoa, Venice, and others. And Marco Polo identified as Venetian. His father and uncle, with whom he was in the family business as merchants, identified as Venetian. So, you know, for all intents and purposes, he was Venetian. And when he came back at the end of his long journey to the east, he came back to Venice.

And what's the Venetian Empire doing at the time? It's famously a trading empire. Do we have to call it piratical? What are they up to? I think pirate, theft, anything you could steal, you know, and carry away on water. It was sort of notorious at that. That was the bad side, I guess. The good side is they were very efficient merchants, and they amassed a lot of wealth

that way. They provided a safe haven for a number of commercial interests. So I think being a pirate at that point, it wasn't like they were the worst actors out there by any stretch of the imagination. So Marco Polo and his father and uncle were part of the establishment in Venice, such as it was. It was a small place. If you've been to Venice, you know you can walk it in a few minutes. It's tiny compared to other areas, but a fantastic concentration of wealth and cultures and churches. So that was Marco Polo's Venice. He came of age, though, on the trail and what we would call the Silk Road.

That's a name that was applied centuries later. But he came of age on the road rather than in Venice or Croatia. Yes, we should say it's a famous maritime empire, but he becomes notorious for a land journey. So how does that start? His father and uncle, keep in mind, this was the famous voyage that began in 1271. It was their second voyage for his father and uncle. He was then a teenager, about 16. Unfortunately, we don't really have any records of his father and uncle's voyage or trip. You know, would that we did, it would have been fascinating to compare, but we don't.

And also, people sometimes assume that Marco Polo, quote, discovered China. But nothing could be further from the truth. It was well known throughout Europe, especially in trading empires like Venice. And this was yet another trip they were taking to trade with China for things that you could carry, especially spices and gems and things like that. They were going actually at that time to the Mongol Empire. The reason why is because Kublai Khan had conquered China, and he had rather skillfully merged these two disparate cultures, one that was pastoral and one that was anything but,

that was pastoral, and one that was anything but, and managed to somehow make it fairly harmonious and to invite Westerners in to trade like the Polos, but there were many others. Well, why did he want them? They often carried out tasks that he didn't trust, that's Kublai Khan, the Mongols to do, especially tax collecting. Why not? Because they tended to be corrupt on one side or the other. This happens in empires from time to time. So he tended to trust outsiders like Venetians, like the Polos and others to do that sensitive job for them. So that was one of their secondary reasons for going and one of the reasons why Marco Polo stayed so long. Before we go any further, I have to add a giant asterisk, and that is, what do we know about Polo? How accurate is it? And the big question, did he actually really go

to China? I think he did. I think there's a lot of evidence, but the evidence that really nails it down is extremely skimpy. And it's possible that there are alternate theories that he didn't actually go and do all the things that he said he did, that he gathered stories from all over, put them together in this highly entertaining travels of Marco Polo that we know. put them together in this highly entertaining travels of Marco Polo that we know. And that's as far as he went. That's probably unlikely, but I think there's some truth to it because his assumptions about the world and Venetians and ours are quite different. This is pre-Gutenberg.

That makes a huge difference. So we're relying on a handwritten manuscript. And there are many different editions or versions of it. We wouldn't have known any of it except for a fluke that was after Marco Polo returned. He was going to stay in Venice. Then, as often happened, Venice and Genoa were doing battle at sea. at sea. He was captured by the Genoese. He was thrown into a prison there. I should say it was a kind of a posh prison, VIP prison. But he was constantly, as far as we know, talking about his experiences with the legendary Gulbul Khan in China. So somebody, and we don't really know how it happened, paired him with a cellmate who happened to be Rusticello of Pisa. Who he? Well, he was a second or third tier poet and verse maker. He wrote down Marco Polo's account. So if not for this series of flukes, we wouldn't have heard anything from Marco Polo. And even this

is a bit indirect. We don't have a manuscript in Marco Polo's handwriting. We have the Rusticello of Pisa version. And even that varies. As I was doing research, I found some editions which were reputed to be in the Urtext, you know, genuine. Some were literally twice as long as others. I relied on one that had been found, I think, sort of later on, but was reputed to be the most complete. And that's the one I relied on. We'll talk about what's in it in a second. But I just wanted to explain to you how inexact it is and how difficult it is to really research this period and why some people think that this whole Marco Polo thing is just myth. I don't think it is myth, but you see the difficulties.

It could be augmented truth. I tried to keep it to what was plausible. I went to China twice and retraced his steps to the extent that I could from across China, starting in Beijing, which he called Kambalak, all the way west, and also in Mongolia, a lot or almost anything that he described conformed to what I saw with some friends and, you know, what was there. One of the big objections that's levied against him is that he didn't write about the Great Wall of China. And how could he not have done that, considering it's so huge, it's visible from the moon, it's actually not, but anyway, you get the idea.

Well, it didn't exist in his day. There was a small wall at that point. The Great Wall was built a century or two after he left. So if he had referred to it, this would have been very suspicious. Time and again, there were things that he talked about which sounded very improbable, which turned out to be true. And other things which you would think, oh, we should have mentioned, but if he was actually relying on a strictly contemporaneous

account, wouldn't have showed up, and they didn't. Also, his idea of what's up and up and what's down is down and north and south are different. And his idea of chronology is different. The travels of Marco Polo are not a diary. It's not your diary. We set out, oh boy, rugged day on the trail. We know we finally got to Kambalak, Limetku. It's not like that. You know, he gathers together accounts, some of which are his own, which are scrupulously in the third person. Others are kind of a jumble. And in those days, people didn't keep first person accounts. That idea came in later, a century or two later. So he was not unusual in this respect. This is part of the challenge of dealing with so-called primary documents from that era. I just tried to do the best I could

in terms of what was actually plausible while noting all these asterisks that I just mentioned to you. Maybe we should get to the actual journey. Thank you for the asterisk. They're important though. But let's get him to China. So his father and uncle that you've mentioned, they go on a 10-year mission. They meet the great Khan. They come back. By this time, Marco is, what, sort of a teenager, 15, 16? A teenager. And they're back for a while.

They trade in their gems. They're quite wealthy. And then they decide they're going to go back at the invitation of the Khan. I don't know how the invitation reached them, but they were welcome to return. And so they went on, you know, we know as the Silk Road, but it wasn't a road. It was a series of paths or passageways that were used by merchants. And it was a network, but they weren't actually trading in silk. They were trading in other things. And also they had this job there, which was to be a tax collector slash census taker for Kublai Khan while they were there. So that gave them a very good window on the Mongol slash Chinese empire at that time. And the Mongol empire is important, right? Because by 1250,

they set out 1271. By 1250, the Mongol Empire, extraordinarily, stretches from basically Korea to the Black Sea. So you can make this journey without every single valley and river crossing, entering somebody else's little kingdom, right? Right, right. The steppe is one of the largest land masses in the world. So we went across the steppe. It is, you know, truly endless. They had a kind of pony express to convey messages back and forth, but messages and data traveled very slowly. Marco Polo got used to it. He learned various survival skills, horseback riding, how to defend himself, although the Mongols were not necessarily that warlike at that time. But it was a different era. Curiously enough, what I went, which is now about 15 years ago, it was in some ways the same. Mongol culture is unchanging in some ways. And we stayed in some of the same places that have been there since time immemorial. We ate some of the food that they did, the notorious or famous koumiss, which is a combination of mare's milk cut with urine and fermented. I had one swig and that was enough.

Also, they're very family oriented in a way, very peaceful, excellent horsemen. But it's a different kind of a culture. They don't believe in private property, quite unlike the Venetians. And so it was a pastoral tradition. They changed their homeland or their tents twice a year. They had a winter and a summer grazing ground, and they went back and forth, but they didn't claim ownership of any of it. And indeed, it was really too big to defend. The exact opposite of Venice. It was as spread out and vague and borderless as Venice was confined. So part of the incredible thing about this story was how these opposites managed to attract in some ways.

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Wherever you get your podcasts. He makes his way across this vast, slightly borderless space, but there's enough security that he actually is able to get across. Is there a bit of banditry, but he's not facing hostile government on the way across? No, he's not. And he had protection in the form of a primitive passport, or I wouldn't say primitive, but their version of the passport called a paisa that he got from Krumplikon, who he conferred on foreigners like Marco Polo. And, you know, they carried it. It was a physical object and it was like a passport. And if he showed it to anybody, that gave him a clear path. And basically, he said he had the protection of the Khan. Anybody who harmed them, you know, would have to answer to the Khan.

And that was enough to scare anybody away. He had it, his father had it, and his uncle had it. I'd like to say he did this, and then he did this, and then he did this, but we don't really have a chronological account. So I can very much, after the fact, try and imagine where they went and recreate their route, but it's kind of guesswork. And we think he's in China, in central China, what, by 1275? So it takes, what, you think the journey might take something like four years? Yes, at least four years, if not longer. And he then came of age there. There's some speculation about, well, what was it like since he was there for so many years? Who became his friends? Did he, you know,

it seemed to me in some ways that his spiritual beliefs changed or evolved over time from being Catholic to being very influenced by Buddhism. I don't think of Marco Polo as being particularly spiritual, but he wrote with empathy and deep feeling about Buddhism and Buddhist imagery that he saw. And it seemed to have permeated his thinking to a certain extent. Now, maybe I'm reading that into the text, but that's how it seemed to me. Anyway, by the time he got back to Venice, it all fell away. Kublai Khan was still on the throne, which is pretty lucky given longevity in those days. The senses that he recognized, and he's like, hey, welcome back. And were they able to bring things that he'd requested? And he was pleased with this arrival.

Yes, he was pleased. He was glad to see them again. to the east, he was using Marco Polo's travels as his main guide, even though it was, of course, extremely dated. And he expected to see Kublai Khan, even though Kublai Khan had died decades earlier. They even brought Columbus, a Chinese translator, with him in order to converse with the Chinese. So that gives you an idea, not just of Columbus's folly, but the influence of Marco Polo's travels. It was Europe's main guide to the East, to Asia, for many, many years. And people relied on it implicitly. And speaking of many years, Marco Polo spent a long time in China, right? So is he a prisoner?

Is he invited to spend time there? What's he doing? Well, he's being a tax collector. He's traveling around. We really don't know what he did on a day-by-day basis because it's not that kind of account. It's more of a summary of parts of China that he experienced. It's almost as if he was writing a travel guide in a general way. In this part of Mongolia or China, you'll find this or find that.

He does talk about customs in Mongolia that astounded Europeans, which they doubted. They thought this can't be true. But it was true. He talked about the marriage of dead children. There was a high infant mortality rate. And one of the Mongol customs was to have a marriage ceremony among these deceased children. And this seemed, you know, very unlikely and improbable to Europeans. But the Mongols actually did this.

It was an ingrained custom at that point in order to perpetuate dynastic lines and family lines. And they had a very powerful belief in the afterlife. So it made sense to the Mongolians. That was one thing that Marco Polo noted. He was also aware that China at that point, not necessarily Mongolia, was well advanced over the West by one or two centuries in philosophy and science and medicine. And that was a much more sophisticated civilization. So we think of him as going, oh, somehow back in time from Venice to a more primitive civilization. In fact, it was the opposite. He was, if you will, going ahead in time to a more sophisticated civilization.

And it was, I said, it'd be a couple hundred years until Europe caught up with what was going on in China. As proof of that, he brought back a number of items and or wrote about them in his travels that Europeans didn't believe or didn't know what to make of when they read his descriptions. One of the most obvious things was paper money at that point, to the extent that there was an economy and exchange, it was rather primitive. Of course, in China, they were using some sort of version of script. And even though Marco Polo wrote about it and might even have brought it back, it didn't catch on. He also wrote about coal, very, very important source of energy and heat and how effective it was. In Europe, they were burning wood all the time and it was much less efficient. Again, it didn't really catch on. So there were a number of other innovations that he didn't bring back. Also, the Chinese had a certain kind of printing press, which he described. This was pre-Gutenberg. It didn't catch on. His innovations, they're really only innovations when they're adopted by the host culture, I guess. And most of these were not. They just didn't comprehend them. So it's a fascinating clash of cultures. And it's kind of counterintuitive in some ways. It's not what you'd

think. And I think that's part of the enduring mystique of Marco Polo. Oh, I should add, there were other Marco Polos going in the opposite direction. There was Rabban Salma. He was Chinese Mongolian. And at the same time that Marco Polo was going in one direction on the Silk Road, Rabban Salma was going the other direction. Now, did they stop and pass each other and chat? I don't know. But I mean, it was more or less the same time. But we see what Marco Polo wrote about on the Silk Road through the eyes of a very different person in a very different culture, Rabban Salma, who also wrote about it. So to do this comparison is really fascinating, because then you get a fuller picture of what the Silk Road was like.

And there were others as well. I just think for a historian, this is the most fascinating kind of material to write about. And he spent 16, 17 years in China, and he likes us to believe that he was a personal confidant of the Kublai Khan. But he would have traveled around doing some tax collecting, reporting back what he saw. I guess, like many emperors through history and kings, it was convenient to have someone with no power base in the country, no previous, who's just loyal only to the emperor themselves and is kind of a useful person at court. Yes, yes.

That's exactly what he was. is kind of a useful person at court. Yes, yes, that's exactly what he was. And all that sort of status, which temporarily attached to Marco Polo, when he was there, you know, the sense of protection, it all fell away once he got back to Venice. And he was not believed when he came back to Venice, and he was in his mid 40s, late 40s, considered a quote, old man, you know, by the standards of that day. And he went around talking about his stories. This is before the Genoa episode. It was said that children chased him down the street saying, Marco Polo, Marco Polo, tell us another lie. So his tall tales of his travels were not believed. And it was only very gradually that the truth of his travels came to

be accepted as a version of reality. How did his dad and uncle died in China, or they made their way back? That's a good question. We don't know. I believe they made their way back. But so much of this is speculation. There are other scholars and historians who have written about it, such as Jonathan Spence, who's an American, and there are others. And they also have their versions. Everybody at some point winds up scratching their hands saying, so far as we know, and the rest is speculation. So far as we know, he heads back on the maritime salt creek, right? He gets a lift from the Chinese. Okay. Yes, he gets a lift and he's very lucky to survive the storms. Oh, and then I should

mention in terms of these other accounts or interpretations, which are now called counterfactual, there's a scholar named Frances Woods, and she wrote a well-known book called, Did Marco Polo Go to China? And she asks tough questions about could this really have happened? Is this a myth which has been perpetuated because it's convenient? And I think she winds up herself, even though she starts out from a position of saying, no, this is a hoax. He didn't go to say, well, you know, it's more likely or you can't really disprove the hoax. Let's put it that way. So she's the most influential of the Marco Polo skeptics. Because

I went and saw myself so much of what he described, and because at least in the overall physical details, it matched, you know, I was inclined to trust it and say there's got to be some veracity to it but his return journey he sails via vietnam malaya india and then reaches a homers was now in the persian gulf even that i imagine this was an absolutely extraordinary journey and then finally he's back in venice and so yes you say he's not believed straight away. Right, right, right. He's not believed because the tales sounded so far fetched. And as I said, you know, keep in mind that without invention of ovable type or the adoption of it in the West made a huge difference. So before that, you wound up with handwritten manuscripts, often stored by monks, you know, they were not widely circulated. So this information was very circumscribed. It was privileged and it wasn't really out there.

It wasn't like he published his account and, you know, it was distributed around and people said, oh, well, that's interesting. There's nothing like that. And as I said, even the travels of Marco Polo are not really in the first person, because that was not the convention then. So we're just dealing with a different time. I mean, I think they're incredibly valuable to have, and Europe relied on it for a couple hundred years. It strikes me that even if people said, well, half it could be exaggerated or speculation. Well, even if half it is true, it's still one of the most extraordinary lives and journeys in the history of the world. That's right. Also, I often wondered what was he doing in his personal life,

you know, as he was coming of age? Who were the intimate figures in his life, if any? Because there probably were some, but there's nothing. We can't even begin to speculate about any sort of partner or confidant that he might have had along the way. So, as I said, there are large blank spaces in the account. But it remains one of the great journeys of exploration, I suppose, in European history. I think partly because of these lacunae. It's so intriguing, you know, what's missing and what's actually there. I guess we should say in terms of what's there, the survival of this account is rare and precious.

Were there other Marco Polos? You mentioned they were going the other way from China to Central Asia and Europe. Were there others going the other way as well? Do you think Marco Polo would have met other Europeans and other Europeans doing similar jobs there, but he's the only one we've heard of? Yes, he certainly met others. He mentions them in passing, but nothing that he talks about in detail. And they didn't write accounts. I guess if you want to have a name that will survive through the ages, you should write an account that's really unique and you've been the only one to go there. That's what makes Marco Polo. If he hadn't written that account, we would never have heard about him or his father or his uncle. Amazing. That's the key lesson of this

podcast, folks. You want to be remembered, write it down. It's all very well doing amazing stuff, but you got to make sure it's written down. Right, right. Lawrence, thank you very much for bringing all your expertise and your firsthand experience of the landscapes which you traveled through. Thank you very much for bringing all to this podcast. Thank you, Dan. Thanks for having me. Thanks.