Dan Snow's History Hit - Marco Polo and The Court of the Great Kublai Khan

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

No throne on Earth came close to rivalling it. The court of Kublai Khan stood at the centre of an empire that threw every other power of its age into shadow. Vast and wealthy beyond comprehension, it seemed a world away from medieval Europe. Yet one young Venetian made the staggering 4-year journey, and wrote down everything that he saw. His name was Marco Polo.Today, Dan draws on Marco's extraordinary diary to take you on a journey across deserts, mountains and oceans, to glimpse the splendour and spectacle of this medieval superpower.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Natasha Hughes.We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. It was the greatest gap year of all time. In the 13th century, a Venetian 17-year-old set out across Eurasia along trade routes, which we now call the Silk Road. He crossed empires and deserts and the vast steppe grasslands, ending up in China at the court of the emperor.

Shizu of Yuan, founder of the Great Yuan, Kagan of the Mongol Empire, son of heaven, Kublai Khan, and at the heart of a world that Europe barely understood. 25 years later, a bedraggled, middle-aged dude staggered back into Venice. He brought with him a story so astonishing that many then and now have doubted its veracity. Tales of mighty empires that simply seemed too incredible to be true. he had one of the greatest stories ever told, one that has obsessed people at the time and ever since. It's definitely an exciting story, but there is a little bit of a problem with it. His tale doesn't quite behave like we'd like it to.

It comes to us 800 years later through fragmented, handwritten manuscripts, riddled with mistakes, weird omissions, contradictions. It's all been subjected to centuries of debate. So, Marco Polo. Was he? Did he really reach China? Did he serve as the Khan's ambassador? And was he really the guy who brought spaghetti back to Europe? In this episode, we're going to find out. We're going to follow Marco Polo's path across Eurasia and back again to find out if he was a liar, a legend, or both. Enjoy. But out of housekeeping first. Marco Polo, born, we think, 1254 in the Republic

of Venice. think he was born in the little island of Kortchila, which is now in modern-day Croatia, lovely place to go for a holiday, a vacation. Local legend around there claims that the town was founded by Ineus, a hero of the Trojan War, by the way. Anyway, at the time of Marco Polo's birth, Kortchler certainly was part of the Venetian Empire. Now, this is just one of history's most fascinating empires. It was a fiercely ambitious, competitive mercantile power in the 13th century. oligarchy, a republic. There was a ruler called the Doge, and he was a sort of head of state, but there was a really a cluster of prominent, wealthy merchants, you'd say, that were in charge.

It was an empire of the sea, and its territory extended from northwest Italy, where Venice is today, all the way down the Croatian coast to Dubrovnik and beyond, places like Crete and Cyprus were part of the Empire too. Its positioning was so strategic. It just sat between Northern Europe, Western Europe, and the Mediterranean and the rest of the world. It just became a flourishing centre of trade. It was the OG, the original Entropot of trade. Look it up in the dictionary. Entrapot, it will say Venice, or it should. Venetian merchants traveled deep into the Byzantine Empire. that's the sort of remnant of the Roman Empire in the east that still controls parts of the Levant, what we call the Middle East. And it travelled beyond that. Some Venetian merchants, we think,

reached the Far East. It was not without its competitors, of course, in this period. Great wealth and success attracted the gaze of ambitious neighbours. The Italian mainland was a hot mess. It was not a united entity. There were a number of competing city states or other empires and kingdoms trying to get involved as well, all vying for control of that. that lucrative trade that flowed across the Mediterranean. There were places like Genoa, the place like Florence. They did compete with Venice. And these cities were flooded with wealth and people from across the Mediterranean, across Europe.

They came to these places because they thought they were safe places to do business. They were safe places to conduct commercial activity. And Venice really benefits on that. It was just densely populated. with merchants, with money lenders, with ship owners, with traders. And as you know, if you go to Venice today, they built magnificent churches and they built palaces as testament to their wealth and success and status. And that's the world that Marco Pelo grew up in. He considered himself very much a Venetian. His family was well-established part of that city's commercial elite. His father Niccolo had been a

successful jewel merchant. Now, he had spent years traveling through Asia. That's, that's Markupolu's backstory. His dad and his uncle had been there before. Possibly, we think, even visiting the court of the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan in distant China. They had established friendly relations. They'd made vitally important personal connections. And the two of them came back to Europe. We think it's his ambassadors. They brought letters for the Pope from the Chinese Emperor. and they'd promised one day to return to China. And that was a big trip. So Marco Polo only met his dad for the first time in 1269,

when his dad and his uncle returned from that mega trip to Asia. And that gives you a sense how long those guys have been away for. So if you do a quick Google search day, you will learn that a direct flight from Venice to Beijing today takes about 10 hours, not in the 13th century. No, no, no. These expeditions took place on ship,

on foot, on horseback, on camelback, you name it. They took years to complete. So traveling and looking east is absolutely in Marco's blood. And it's not surprising at all that before long Marco set off on his first journey. 1271. Niccolo and Maffaio, so dad and uncle, they undertook their second expedition to the east, to the court of Kublai Khan, to the heart of China.

and they would travel on the Silk Road, and this time they would take young Marco with them in tow, 16, 17 years old. Now, even if you know not very much about the Middle Ages, the chances are that you will have heard of the Silk Road. It's increasingly important today as well as a concept in our new globalised trading system. The Silk Road is neither one road nor is it all about silk. Instead, it takes its name from the luxury goods, that travelled along all sorts of different roads and sea routes for centuries connecting China with foreign markets. Silk was a very important product, so we call it the Silk Road. It was a vast network of overland maritime trade routes connecting East Asia, Central Asia,

South Asia, Middle East, North Africa and Europe. It was just a superhighway of trade and people and ideas and unfortunately disease as well from time to time. Now, over the centuries, these routes facilitated the exchange of goods and technologies and religions and languages and ideas between all these different civilizations. Most people, most merchants, did not travel the entire length of the silk road. You didn't buy some silk in southern China and then sell it when you got to Venice or Paris. No. Instead, no, the goods would change hands. They'd go through a whole bunch of, a chain of different merchants as they moved along. And that's what makes the polos interesting and different, is they do have a crack at traveling the length of it.

The three of them left Venice and they first reached Aker, which is in modern-day Israel. So they sail across the East Mediterranean to Aker. They had that all-important piece of paper. They had credentials from the Pope. Pope Gregory, he'd been elected, and he had given them letters for the Chinese, for Kublai Khan, the great ruler of China. they were accompanied by two Dominican fries, so two priests, they would accompany the expedition, but they soon abandoned the journey and who can blame them, because long distance travel at this time was slow, it was grueling, it was extremely dangerous and uncomfortable.

And it was not for the faint-hearted, it was not for people who perhaps got used to life in the monastery, men of the cloth. As you can imagine, these trading caravans were laden down. with valuable goods. And so they were a tempting prize for enterprising bandits. Raids and robbery and theft were commonplace. The roads could be dangerous themselves, just physically dangerous. They were often just rocky trails and paths through vast deserts and over precarious mountain ranges. The weather was a determined enemy. Travelers faced monsoons. They faced snow. extreme temperatures that at best slowed progress, and at worst, wiped out entire trading convoys. And then there's the politics. Always politics. Local wars could break out in an

instant. That could shut down travel completely, or you had to carry enormous detours around conflict zones. And on top of that, illness, of course, the ever-present threat of illness in a pre-modern society, disease that hung over travellers all the time. Medical knowledge was limited at best, and sickness so often proved fatal. So I cannot overestimate just how challenging these journeys were, and I cannot blame those two friars for bowing out and heading home. But our intrepid Venetians, they headed onwards. From Acre, the poloes travelled to Ayas in modern-day Turkey,

which was an important Mediterranean trading port. Then they turned east and just went for it. They crossed the entirety of Persia and Central Asia using these established Silk Road trading routes. The pilots were originally considered taking the perhaps less tiring option of sailing in a boat from the Persian port of Hormuz, you might have heard of it, directly to China.

But in the end, they just didn't like the look of the ships. And Marco records that the ships were wretched affairs, held together not by iron nails, but by twine made from coconut husks. Not fancying their chances on the coconut boats, they kept walking. They went overland across Asia. Their route took them through regions that roughly correspond to modern day Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia, before crossing deserts and mountain ranges and getting them into what is now China. By now, we are several years into the journey.

One desert that cross was the famous infamous Gobi Desert. That took them a month just by itself. Marco writes about hearing eerie voices echoing in the dunes, spirits calling out travellers' names to lure them away from the caravan to die of dehydration. In northern Afghanistan, we hear that Marco Polo fell severely ill and spent a full year recovering, praising the pure mountain air for curing him. but that just shows you the pace at which they're moving. Thankfully, in 1275, about four brutal years after leaving Venice, the expedition finally reached the domain of Kublai Khan, the man who ruled over China. And they made for the emperor's summer palace at Shangdu.

So Kublai Khan, who's he? he is the grandson of the famed Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan. So Genghis Khan carves out the biggest empire of the world's ever seen to that point, including much of China, and then his successors had engaged in various succession struggles and battles. But Kublai Khan had emerged as the Great Khan in 1260, and in 1271 he proclaimed the founding of the great Yuan dynasty. So this was the Uandis, a vast empire that encompasses much of what we'd now called China,

but parts of Mongolia and Siberia and also the Korean Peninsula and Southeast Asia. It was truly probably the most powerful, richest glittering empire on Earth at the time. You've got a period when Europe is fractured to various small, bickering kingdoms. Asia was experiencing what we call the Pax Mongolia, the Mongolica, the Mongol peace, which was quite a brief window following the Mongol conquests from the South China Sea all the way through to the edge of Europe, really. Marka Polly and his family are really taking advantage of that because a traveller with the right credentials, the right passport, could suddenly move right across those thousands of miles of Eurasia along the Silk Road

through territory that was nominally under the control of this Mongol overlord. And do so with minimal fear of attack and local bandits and local kings. Because the Great Khan was absolutely terrifying, and his writ did pretty much run across this vast space. So they're seizing this opportunity and moving through this Mongol Empire. Niccolo and Maffaio had, all importantly, been given a passport release, it's called a Paisa, during their first expedition. Diplomatic documents that said they were authorized to travel freely across this mighty empire, and they were able to demand and receive lodging and horses and escorts across the entirety of the great Kahn's domains.

So, of course, there are going to be security concerns, but on the whole, no bandit, certainly no sort of minor princeling or local leader is going to risk the wrath of the Khan by attacking his protected subjects. Throwback, by the way, Genghis Khan was at his most violent when his ambassadors were disrespected. You don't want to know what he did with those people who disrespected his ambassadors, and I think the memory of that would have endured into this period. So when the Polos reached the court of Kublai Khan at Shangdu, they're arriving at the centre of one of the biggest, well, the greatest empires in history.

According to Marco Polo's account, the Khan received the travellers warmly. He was quite interested in them. He's got particular interest in young Marco. So says Marco Polo. But anyway, Marco Polo later describes these events in his book The Travels of Marco Polo. And look, this is a difficult book. It's contested. Historians are skeptical about many aspects of this narrative. Sadly, lots of it can't be independently verified. That's the nature of a wild gap here, folks. It remains hotly debated today.

It's not a diary. You're not getting a contemporary account day by day of what Marco Polo had for breakfast and what he dreamt about. We don't even think it was written by him, wasn't written by him. He narrated his story to the poet and writer, Rusticelo da Pisa, while the two men were imprisoned by the Genoese years after Polo visited the Mongol Empire. It is imperfect, folks. There was no printing press at the time, so all the subsequent versions of this tale were painstakingly copied out by hand in the years that followed. So there are discrepancies between different versions. Some are twice, as long as others. So you have no idea who's adding what or taking stuff out. On top of all that, annoyingly, it never mentions details that you think would be crucial to the region that he was travelling and that would be kind of useful bits of evidence to corroborate his story. So he doesn't talk about the Great Wall of China, which is annoying. And he also doesn't mention tea. And this

has led some historians to assert that Marco Pello never reached China at all, and it's largely a myth. But don't panic. I interviewed the historian Lawrence Berggrina a few years ago. He wrote a lot of wrote the definitive biography of Marco Polo, and he does reject the idea that the story is a myth, there are geographical features in the book that do match the real world, and many of what seemed to be quite fanciful assertions, actually many of them have been proved accurate. Many of them have been corroborated by historians, by archaeologists, things like that. For example, he described paper money, which was a concept unfamiliar to Europeans, and that some subsequent people thought, therefore, must be fabricated, because Europeans at the time were using precious

metals like gold and silver currency coins. The concept of buying and selling very, very valuable goods for bits of paper made from bark seemed ridiculous to people. But we now know that China was already using paper money. So China was well ahead of the game at that point, although it's interesting that refusal to accept these paper bills as current. was punished by the Khan with execution. You have to have confidence in the currency. Some things haven't changed, but I don't think the Bank of England

or the Federal Reserve would be able to get away with that today. Equally, Marco Polo describes a black stone that is lit on fire and used for warmth. Europeans used wood for heating in this period. They were sceptical. Now, of course, we know he was describing coal. So all of that is to say that, yes,

we need to, of course, approach Marco Polo's accounts of his escapades with a pinch of salt, obviously. It can't be believed wholesale, for sure, but it doesn't mean that there is an interesting story in there, a more reliable account. It's there, if you know where to look. And as more archaeological and written evidence emerges,

actually more and more of the account appears to be believable, appears to be true, or at least truth adjacent. It's very exciting. So let's go back to 1275. He's arrived at the court of Kublai Khan. Marco reported presenting the great Khan, with the papal letters. They've thankfully kept all these letters from the Pope.

And Gregory the 10th, the Pope has also sent gifts. According to the account, Kublai Khan questions him extensively about Europe, about Christianity and about the customs that he's grown up with and surrounded by. The Polars were not the only traders present in Kubla's court. The Mongol Empire had always thrived on trade and had made promoting it a top priority. So they've just one delegation of many. China was known to merchants further west, who had always sought out spices and silk and gems and other things from the distant land.

Polo portrays the court as extraordinarily wealthy, highly organized, highly cosmopolitan, on an absolutely gigantic scale. Well, some details may be exaggerated or shaped by literary convention at the time. There are aspects that do align with other evidence from Chinese Mongol and other sources. Right, more coming up on Marco Polo after this. Don't go away, folks. Marco Polo is a young European man in the Imperial Court in China, and he gets to have a good look at one of the most remarkable figures of medieval history, Kublai Khan. Marco Polo said he was an intelligent, capable ruler, who'd consolidated control over China and governed a vast empire.

He writes that he was curious about foreign people, religions, technologies. And he also gives this just wonderful, this famous description of Shungdu, this vast, vast Chinese imperial city. He describes a grand palace surrounded with walls and extensive hunting ground stocked with animals. And here's what's cool. Archaeological investigations at Shungu have confirmed that there was a vast imperial complex, not unlike the one described by Marco Polo. We hear descriptions also of imperial ceremonies. So according to Polo, there's a strict hierarchy. nobles and officials were arranged according to rank in the Kublai's court. There were elaborate rules governing who could approach the emperor, who could not. Guests went at to perform ceremonial acts

of homage, of respect. There were vast banquets held for important occasions. And he just talks, he really emphasizes the vast, the immense number of courtiers, of guards, of servants, of administrators, musicians, officials that would participate in these huge imperial events. And some of Marcos' most vivid passages concern feasts and banquets. He describes gold and silver vessels, tables groaning with them, large quantities of meat and wine, entertainers, musicians, acrobats. And those banquets aren't just meals, they are demonstrations of the Khan's imperial power and wealth. He can't go out to everywhere in his empire. He is bringing the empire to him and flexing.

And finally, he talks about the religious diversity at the court. This is so interesting. There are Buddhists there, there are Muslims there, Christians, and then there are the followers of traditional Mongol beliefs. Look, it's possible here that he was telling a tall tale about the luxuries and wealth of the East, but many of the features he describes, we've got some corroboration. We know that other accounts of Kublai Khan's rule do fit in with this. It was certainly a time of enormous wealth, of military power, a time where domestic policies promoted trade and religious tolerance. We know that Kublai Khan employed a really big range of people, including foreigners, people

from all around his empire and beyond, including Persians, Central Asians and even some Europeans. And scholars consider that this aspect of Marco Pella story is very plausible because Mongols really did rely on non-local administrators and specialists. They were happy to promote talent wherever it might have come from as long as they were loyal. In fact, sometimes they preferred outsiders. Kublai Khan may have distrusted local officials because of concerns about corruption and local insider dealing and a local power. for example, he may have preferred foreigners to help him extend his rule over his vast empire. Because this is the beginning of a really extraordinary chapter in Marco Polo's life, is that we think that the great Khan, Kublai Khan, employed him as a trusted servant and envoy.

In The Travels, Marco states that he traveled on official missions through various regions of the Empire and reported back to the Emperor on local conditions. And it makes sense because the Emperor wants to know what's going. on. So you take this guy who's got no local axe to grind, who's a stranger, who owes everything to the emperor, and perhaps he'll give a more honest account than some local official who's got his fingers and all sorts of pies you can only dream of. Marco Pello describes journeys to areas that correspond with modern China, Myanmar, Vietnam, other parts of Asia. It's just extraordinary. And he talks about details of these places that are just unfamiliar to Europeans. We've got paper money,

we've got coal, we talked about that. He also says, he also. He also, he's not. He also, described enormous sophisticated cities, like Kahnbulik, the capital of the Mongol Empire, that roughly sits where modern day Beijing is today. That's pretty much the reason Beijing is there today. He writes about broad streets laid out on a grid, large markets, crowded commercial districts centered around massive palace compounds. And he claims that this city, for example, had a population larger than any city in Europe. Although Marco's population estimates are probably inflated, historians agree that Khanbalik was among the largest,

most sophisticated cities in the world in the 13th century. And so it's not surprising that Marco Polo is repeatedly stressing the wealth, the scale, the sophistication of Asia, and just the abundance of trade goods. They're arriving from across Asia in these cities, and then they're being re-exported. He gives us just such a tantalizing glimpse into Mongol society more broadly, so beyond the palace, strongly family-orientated. Remember, this is originally a nomadic culture that upsticks

and moved twice a year. They chase the seasons, they move between summer and winter grazing grounds. One thing the Venetians would have found very striking was this was a society with very different ideas about private land ownership in particular. In a region as vast as a Mongolian step when you're moving around all the time and your wealth is measured in in livestock and other movable objects. Why are you going to waste resources defending that particular acre of land, saying that that is all important, your private property? So it's these differences between Venice and the East, the Mongols, China, that make Marco Polo's story so striking to people at the time and still to us in the present day. He talks about

the scale of the imperial administration, the vast taxation of the Khan's empire, the nature of long-distance communications and trade networks that link China with the rest of Asia and beyond. He talks about the sophistication of Chinese society. He thinks it was more advanced than European counterparts in fields like medicine and science. He was just fascinated by the world he found himself in. And it seems pretty clear that in his mind at least, he was traveling to a society that was in many ways more advanced, not more primitive, than the one that he came from. And if you think about great chunks of European history and thought and literature, that is not always the case. But there were elements that shocked European readers, for sure. For example, he records one practice that involved the marriage of deceased children.

Mongol society had a very high in for mortality rate, and families sometimes held symbolic marriages for dead children. These ceremonies took place. The custom was connected to beliefs about lineage and the afterlife. And the Europeans found that practice unbelievable. But we now know that the custom was genuinely practiced in some Mongol community. So another fascinating glimpse there, another fragment that suggests that there is truth here in this account. And it's given historians such a precious glimpse into these societies.

So what's the consensus? Most historians believe that Marco Polo probably did spend years in UN, China, undertaking administrative or diplomatic work. However, frustratingly, there are no surviving Chinese records that specifically confirm the high-ranking positions Marco later claimed to have had. wouldn't it be great to discover those? So it is probable that Marco inflated his own importance, very relatable. I do it all the time. His account presents himself as a trusted imperial agent who travelled widely throughout the Yuan Empire, very close to the Great Khan, to Kublai Khan himself.

And we look, we should be skeptical about this. Of course, we should be skeptical about everyone's CVs, folks, there. That's a free bit of advice. It's unlikely that he served as the overall governor of the city of Yangzhou. But I think it is likely that he did travel extensively in the empire in some capacity. He claims, Marco Polo claims, that he remained in the service of Kublai Khan for approximately 17 years in total. The Polo family as a whole appeared to have spent about two decades in Asia before returning West. They probably needed that amount of time to recover from the journey, to be honest.

According to Marco's account, the Polo's repeatedly requested permission to return homes. they did want to get back to Europe. Kublai Khan was now well into his 70s, and the Polos knew that when he died, well, that was a scary time, because then you get competing factions that emerge, and they could easily sort of wipe out any foreign favorites of the deceased emperor.

It was likely to be a very dangerous transition to the next ruler. But Kublai Khan was reluctant to lose his experienced foreign servants. An opportunity did arise, though, in 1291, when the UN court needed escorts for a Mongol princess, Kukachin, who was being sent by sea to marry a ruler in Persia. Kublai Khan finally allowed the polos to accompany that expedition. So they depart from China, by sea, a fleet of 14 massive ships, hundreds of crewmates, and they travel through Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.

It took two years. The journey was catastrophic. Hundreds of crewmen died from tropical illnesses, died from bad weather. I mean, sea journeys were brutal in this period. But eventually they do reach Persia. But by the time they'd arrived, the intended bridegroom had died. And Kukachin married another member of the Mongol ruling dynasty in that part of the world instead. The polos then got permission to keep heading west,

and they finally returned to Venice via Constantinople in 1290. after an absence of roughly 24 years. Legend has it that when they arrived in Venice, they were dressed in ragged, stinking, filthy Mongol robes. They spoke broken. They couldn't hardly remember their mother tongue. Their own relatives didn't recognize them. They'd assumed that the polos had died years ago.

It's almost like a medieval odyssey. To prove who they were, the polos apparently put on a feast, and they changed into lavish outfits, and in full view of those attending, they ripped open their battered travel coats, and out came a cascade of rubies and emeralds and other jewels. Now that's probably a legend, but what we can confidently say is that when Marco Polo arrived home, he was middle-aged, he was probably, well, unrecognizable to his own relatives, and he was completely knackered, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had forgotten a lot of his native Italian tongue. He'd been living in a completely different society for a quarter of a century.

He probably did come across as a bit odd, as a bit changed. Many people did find his stories about the Mongol Empire, about China, about these vast agencies. They found them hard to believe. His accounts did sound like the kind of thing sailors told each other in bars in the dockyards. They sounded almost mythical. What's so fascinating about the world at this time is that there's just drama going on everywhere. I don't know there's any such thing as enjoying an old, comfortable retirement safe at home. And that's illustrated by the fact that not long afterwards, he finds himself thrust into one of the many European conflicts that were raging at this time. He's involved in a naval battle with the Genoese. It's in 1298, these two Italian cities

going after each other. And he was captured, he was imprisoned. It was there and then that he met Rusticcello de Pisa and he dictated his stories to him in a prison cell. right there, and that's when the travels was produced. Now, Rasticello was a writer. He wrote chivalric romances, so he injected Polo's story with a lot of drama. You can see how we get the problem that we've got. It was published under the Italian name Il Milione, the Million, which was Marco's nickname in Venice. Historians debate the reason, but one theory is that Venetians dismissed his grand tales as lies, Il Milione, therefore refers to the million lies that he told about his adventures.

It's so mean. Imagine going through all that. Coming back, telling the story, and not being believed. That is tough. That's what you call gaslighting. The book, though, was circulated widely throughout Europe. It became one of the most influential travel accounts of the Middle Ages, really of all time, in fact.

And it very much inspired later explorers, including Christopher Columbus, who owned an annotated copy. He clearly believed that this was an essential piece of intelligence. He did not think it was made up. As for Marco himself, he was released in 1299 from Genoese captivity. He returned to Venice. He got married, he had three daughters, and it seems that he lived out the rest of his life as a prosperous merchant.

In 1324, he died. And supposedly, on his deathbed, a priest and his friends gathered. gathered round and implored him to recant the blatant exaggerations in his book so he could confess his sins and enter heaven with a clean bill of health, with a clean soul. And Marco famously snapped back. I have not told half of what I saw because I knew I would not be believed. Don't you love that? I get goosebumps on that every time. Marco Polo's life marked the beginning of a major shift in how Europe imagined Asia. His experiences absolutely inspired later explorers during the age of discovery. The Portuguese, Italians, the Spanish, everyone. It helped to drive those people to explore the world to sail further in the hope of arriving at Asia.

He helped the Europeans to shape their ideas about their place in the world. In another sense though, and this is an important point, we are still talking about his story, it's still successful, and it should remind us because of the simple fact that he wrote it down, or rather he had someone else write it down. Just imagine the biographies and stories and adventures that people have had on this planet over the centuries and that have died with them. The vast majority of explorers never recorded their experiences in writing. And so in that way, Marco Polo's account is remarkable simply because we have it, because it was written down and it survived and we've got it 800 years later.

There you have it, folks. That's one big lesson takeaway from this podcast. If you want to be remembered, if you want to ensure that all your incredible achievements and funny anecdotes are remembered, you've got to write them down and then make sure that that account is preserved. As to the veracity of all this, well, I think modern historians, largely now the consensus is we're rejecting the old claim that Marco Polo was a fantasist who had just fabricated his journey. As we said, many details match descriptions. We can corroborate it from Chinese and Persian other sources. Also later explorers and new evidence has shown that much of what he described was accurate, even if, of course, there was some exaggeration or some misunderstanding. we've got no evidence that he brought spaghetti back to Europe from China. But to be fair to him, he did change European's understanding of the world and their place within it. So I think we should give him some credit for that. Well, guys, that brings this episode

to an end. As ever, I'm so grateful. I'm really, for your time. Thank you for watching and listening to this. Make sure you hit like and subscribe and smash all the buttons, and then you won't miss another episode. See you next time. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up's history and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England. What it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe.