Gone Medieval - Marco Polo

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

One of history’s great adventurers, Marco Polo’s accounts of his travels - dictated while in prison - were exceptionally widely read, introducing Europeans to the then-mysterious culture and inner workings of the Eastern world, including the wealth and great size of the Mongol Empire and China in the Yuan Dynasty.In this edition of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis finds out more about Marco Polo and his travels from historian Laurence Bergreen, author of Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians including Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here > You can take part in our listener survey here. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Some names are seared into the popular consciousness, even if the history around them is less than familiar. For some, Marco Polo is again, but before that, he was a member of an astonishing family whose travels fascinated in their own day and continue to be both interesting and controversial today. I'm delighted to be joined by Lawrence Burgreen, a historian who's written about explorers from Magellan to Francis Drake,

and from Columbus to the voyages to Mars. Of course, the Trailblazer was medieval, though. Lawrence has also written about Marco Polo, from Venice to Zanadu, and is here to tell us more about the man himself. Welcome to Gone Medieval Lawrence. Thanks very much, man. Glad to be here. It's great to cover someone like Marco Polo, such a familiar name. To start off with them, what do we know about Marco's family background? When is he born and where is he from? He was from Venice, and we know a lot about him because he wrote about himself. But keep in mind that this was pre-Gutenberg. So historical documents from that era, when he was born in about 1254,

they don't have the same coordinates that we have. So when he talks about distances or even days, it's different. And even up and down is different. And so we have to make allowances for that. And even the account Marco Polo's travels, which is so famous, exists in dozens of different versions, because he didn't write it down. He dictated it much later at the end of his life, which meant that a lot of inconsistencies creep into it. Anyway, what we know about the Polo family is that they were literally merchants from Venice. And it's commonly assumed that somehow Marco Polo discovered China. But that's not true. There had been travelers going from Europe, especially Venice. along what we now call the Silk Road to China for decades, if not centuries. So he was traveling a well-worn path. Also, the term Silk Road is sort of a nisnomer because nobody referred to it at that time.

Nobody said, hi, I'm going off to the Silk Road, see you in 20 years. It was a series of trails or directions to get from Europe to China. And there were many different Silk Roads, if you will. It was a term that was invented by German historians in the 19th century, and it was catchy and it caught on. The Silk Road that Marco Polo traveled wasn't necessarily the one that somebody else traveled. So there were lots of travelers on it, and they were all nationalities. There were Uyghur travelers. There were Asian travelers.

So when he was on the Silk Road, he would have seen people from all nations, if you will, following more or less the same path. And some of them wrote accounts, which are quite fascinating in different languages and give their view of some of the same places that Marco Polo visited. One of the best known as Raban Sama, who was a Uyghur Mongol. And he went to some of the same places that Marco Polo went and wrote about them, but we've seen them from a different perspective. Anyway, unlike the other explorers I wrote about, who were bold and financed by the state and courageous, Marco Polo was going along with his father and his uncle. It was certainly a long trip and potentially hazardous,

but it was not a journey of conquest. It was one of commerce. It was peaceful. It was not official. It was a long undertaking. They knew they would be gone for a long time. But that's what Polo and other merchants of Venice did. So when Marco went, he was a teenager.

What makes it interesting is when he came back 20 or something years later, he had come of age, and he grew up on the Silk Road, if you will. And you can see, at least it seemed to me, his changing over time and the way he matured and his perceptions enlarged because of his experiences, because he did not grow up in Venice. In fact, when he got back years later, after being in prison and a long complicated series of events, it was somewhat strange to him. And he had to relearn his way there because he had been a way, for so many years. And so his life has a kind of an accidental quality to it. And that gives the travels part of its charm, but it's different from Columbus or Magellan or some of the other people I've written about because it was accidental.

Yeah, and I guess if he left Venice in his teens and spent 20-odd years in the Mongol Empire, he must have been brought up more culturally Mongol than culturally Venetian, perhaps. I think his identification switched because he wound up through a incredible series of circumstances, but it's been verified as an envoy to Kubla Khan. Kubla Khan was at the time the most, we think of him as a fabled name, but he was also the most powerful ruler on the face of the earth at that time.

And he was not Chinese, he was a Mongol, but he had managed to learn the trick or whatever you want to call it, of reigning over both empires. So he was generally considered to be generally peaceful and very admired. But he remained faithful to his Mongol roots, but he was to use a term which is out of context. He was multicultural because he respected a lot of different cultures and languages. Some people assume that he was an important person in Kubla Khan's life. Not really. He was one more envoy running errands in the question. court of Kubla Khan. Well, why would he want somebody from Venice to do that? At that time, the Mongol Empire, which included China, was huge, probably the largest on the face of the earth.

And so how did you keep everybody in touch? How did you collect taxes? How did you administer it? How did you enforce it if need be? Well, the Mongols, with the help of the Chinese, had developed systems from doing that. It was very clever because they were really different. Chinese tended to stay put. The Mongols were a nomadic tradition. They didn't really have much in the way of private property. That's true even today. They roamed over thousands of miles across the step. They moved twice a year, quite unlike a Chinese city. So in many ways, they were the opposite. Anyway, he managed the trick of somehow making these two sides cooperate and even play off each other. So Marco Polo may have done his share of tax collecting, which other far

did for the Mongol Empire. Why foreigners? Because they were considered more trustworthy than people who were part of one side or the other. They're not the only culture that's done that. As Marco Polo came of age, you could see his perceptions changing. One of the things I thought was interesting was his spiritual or religious evolution. Obviously he was Catholic when he went. But as time went, and he went for so many years and decades along the Silk Road, his lens, if you will, widened. And he began to see things because he did have the gift or intuition of empathy through other people's eyes. He was astounded, for example, by incidents like the marriage of dead children,

which the Mongols were doing, which he writes about in detail, in order to keep their family lines or bloodlines alive. So this for them showed a powerful belief in the afterlife or life after death. For Marco, this seemed as incredible or shocking to him as it would to us, but gradually he came to see where they were coming from, so to speak. And this happened in many different ways. He also fell under the influence of Buddhism. Now, I am not a Buddhist expert, and I don't pretend to be.

And I do know there are many flavors of Buddhism. but it seemed to me the way he wrote about it, that he also took a keen interest in it and might have considered himself a Buddhist. This is just a way of saying that his view of the world kept widening as it went on. This made his account, his travels, very sympathetic to all the events that were going on around him and not too judgmental. Actually, he was lucky to have the Khan's protection. He carried what was known as a page. which was a passport from the Khan, which gave him some protection. And that was a good thing to have.

But he was often exposed to hazard and was lucky to escape with his life. One other criticism that's often leveled at him is that he couldn't have gone because he didn't mention some of the most obvious things about China. Chief among them is the Great Wall of China. How can you go to Beijing or Kambulak, as it was then called, and not mention the great wall. It wasn't built when he was there. There was a smaller wall, but it was not of the scale of the great wall.

So it would have been strange if he did mention it, it would have meant that somebody was tinkering with the manuscript. There are some other examples of that. Why isn't this there? Why isn't that there? Because they didn't exist during the decades when he was there. Also, there's a question of even if he actually went, even with all these inconsistencies, because there was very little proof that he was actually there,

because he took on another name, a Mongol name, and we don't know what that name is. So if he was there, he was traveling under this assumed name. However, there was some Chinese scholars not that long ago found this very specific incident that he records about escorting a princess out of captivity. And the way he writes about it was very specific. It was also recorded in the Chinese annals and refers to a person who could only have been Marco Polo who was involved. Now, there's no way that these two incidents could have intersected so precisely. And I think there are others.

Nevertheless, it is often frustrating to try and find Marco Polo's footsteps, if you will. Yet, his account was so capacious that it serves almost as a narrative encyclopedia of, China in the 13th century. What was it really like? It includes a great deal of information about customs, about the roads, about the people, and especially about the commerce. So you can see what his perspective is and where he's coming from. It's possible that he didn't crisscross China as much as he claimed, even though he was a tax collector, which would have meant that he was out on the road a lot. And I think the reason for that is at some point he was simply gathering accounts that he read about or heard from other travelers and paraphrasing them as if he were there and he wasn't. I think it's a combination of firsthand and third hand observation that he gathered.

So in a way, this makes it more valuable because it's a compendium of observations. Nothing there has really been disproved. So there's almost nothing in it that didn't really happen, that couldn't have happened, that happened a hundred years or before or later after he was there. So I think it's the best kind of record that we have. But again, keep in mind that his assumptions about the world, which way was up and which way was down, are different from ours. And so we have to make allowances for that. Also, it's incredibly fascinating when you think about it because he had to deal with, of course, his Venetian dialect and the Chinese dialect and the Mongolian dialect, plus any others that he came across.

So, you know, he was proved to be very gifted and versatile and somehow merging all these into something that people could understand. Now, it gets a little more complicated with which version of his travels, and there's no consensus about this. They're available in different versions, some are online, some are in books, some are in translations, but it's not really clear what's the most authentic. My choice was to go with the longest version of the manuscript, which was found in a church, and it's actually twice as long as some others. So I think the more Marco Polo, the better. So that's the one I generally relied on. And in my book, I tried to indicate where there was some variation about that. I don't know if there'll ever be a consensus

about what's the best Marco Polo manuscript. Keep in mind, and I think people sometimes forget, he didn't write it himself. He dictated it. Now, he may have had a lot of notes that he brought back with him, but when he got back to Venice, Venice was engaged in one of its frequent naval battles with Genoa,

he wound up in jail. Now, it was sort of a cushy jail cell, it's the kind that VIP prisoner would go to, and he was even provided with a manuensis to write down his stories, because from what we hear about him of contemporary accounts, when he got back home, he was always talking about his travels in China and kept saying, oh, he could write a book. The name of the Emanuenses was Rastichello of Pisa. Now, Rastichello was a sort of second-tier court poet, a strange choice for Emanuenses.

He was not a historian. Marco Polo dictated a great part of his travels to Rastichello in Pisa. when they were both in captivity in this kind of country club jail, if you will. That probably wasn't that nice, but you know what I mean. And then that's the manuscript we have. It's Rusticello's account. So it's secondhand, and we're not really clear where he got some of his material from either. Some of it, of course, was from memory and experience, but others he might have collated.

So it's a somewhat complicated and fascinating history. of the entire book and Marco Polo. And of course, over time, his name, partly because it's so euphonious, has become synonymous with travel and children's games. But the real Marco Polo was pretty well known in his lifetime, but there were other Marco Polos around as well, also writing about their travels.

But he's just, I think because of its large vision and his anecdotal as storytelling ability is the one that has claimed a private place. Yeah, it's interesting that we tend to think of people like Marco Polo being the only ones doing it, because that's the story we're aware of. But it's interesting that he was by no means the only person doing it. Perhaps he just happened to write the most engaging account of it, and that's what made him famous. But somehow we conflate all of these things and we create this idea that Marco Polo was the only person traveling around Asia at this time from the West, when clearly he wasn't. No, he clearly wasn't. And also they came from all different directions.

You know, Raban Sama, who I mentioned, was going the other way on the Silk Road. I don't know if they ever actually passed each other, but he gives an account. Marco Polo was going more or less from west to east. Raban Sama was going from east to west. And there were others. Just the other day, I came across an account by a Turkish traveler. I had never heard of this person until about a week ago. And he wrote a seven-volume account.

Hebes travels not only on the Silk Road, but many other places. This is a very important entry in travel literature, but travel literature almost by its nature is boundless, if you will. And also there's all sorts of language issues because often travelers are going through lands where the language is different from their native language. We think of English as the world standard or the gold standard. But in fact, it's only a small part of the globe. And Portuguese could be another language that's very important. But again, it's only a small part except for many countries in South America, which speak Portuguese. And the same applies for other languages.

How much of a tyrant really was Julius Caesar? And it's very interesting to think about why it's Caesar in particular when there have been many political assassinations in the past millennia, why Caesar's has been the one that is brought up again and again. Would we have ever stood a chance against the first dinosaurs? In the Jurassic, you see dinosaurs get very. bigger and you see meat-eating dinosaurs grow into things like the size of buses. And did Helen of Troy really have the power to launch a thousand ships? She is always derided as this sort of terrible adulterish, but at least as old as Homer,

at least the 8th century BC, is a counter-tradition in which Helen doesn't go to Troy. She's never Helen of Troy, she's Helen of Egypt. Well, you can expect all of this and more from the ancients on History Hit. Join us twice a week every week as we experience. some of the greatest moments of our ancient past. Subscribe to the ancients wherever you get your podcasts. Marco Polo then heads off east in his teens, spends over 20 years there, seems to have been incredibly successful,

might have considered himself sort of culturally Mongol, was interested perhaps in religion that existed there as well. Do we know what convinces him to come home when he does? Why does he return to Venice? Well, I think Kubla Khazarin was coming to an end. end. And I think it was time to get out of town. That was part of it. Also, he had been away for decades, and he wanted to go home. So he began the long journey home. And there was no logical successors to his father and uncle. And the plan was not to emigrate, if you will, to the East,

but to go on a trading mission and come back. And he did bring back a number of very interesting items that were important for the West and they were not known here before, or if they were known, their usefulness was barely understood. To give one example, paper money, which seems ordinary to us. In Venice in his day, the medium of exchange was coins or gems. And I think they were aware of paper money, but it seemed pointless to them. It was script. It had no value. But he saw how it could be very valuable on the Silk Road because it was light and easy to carry, and there was no dispute about how much it was worth. So he helped to popularize that. Another one which had a huge influence on the West was gunpowder. You can imagine the effect of that. There were others who were

brought back gunpowder. He wasn't the only one, but somehow his was the one that had the impact. And of course, I had a huge influence on warfare and defense and weapons and things like that. So I think some of the most valuable things that he brought back, in addition to his reminiscences in the form of the travels, are devices or inventions like these. He brought back some scientific devices, which the West was not ready to understand. Oh, I should preface this by saying, when Marco Polo set out for the East, he was traveling in, to the future. He was going to a land which was state-of-the-art, cutting edge, if you will, and even a place like Venice, which was fairly advanced and sophisticated, was far behind and technology at that time. Chinese science, Chinese philosophy, Chinese math, all more

advanced over the West. So you may say, well, when did the West catch up? Well, that started during the Renaissance. And for various reasons, China's advances slowed and the West increased until eventually the West overtook China in many ways. That's according to us and the West, the Chinese may have a different story. That's one other thing I tried to keep in mind. We're hearing this from Marco Polo's point of view or some others whom he has subsumed in this account. However, China would look at it a different way. They would have their perspective. So I think one of the fascinating things about it and one of the difficult things is to try and keep in mind these different perspectives. So his perspective is one. Others would have a different

perspective. And I think it's much more interesting than having a totally fixed perspective, which you can do with other things. But with travel, the whole point of travel is that you're traveling. Yeah, is it true as well? I read somewhere that his account is the first record of burning coal as a form of fuel. Yes. The kind of things that we take as everyday staples now, or we did until fairly recently, are literally because this guy went off to the east

and came back with some stories. Yes, coal was known in the West, but nobody knew what could be useful for. So, of course, eventually it became ubiquitous as a source of energy for heating and so many other things. But before then, you know, it was there, and oh, what good was it?

Well, it was Marco Polo who showed because of what he had experienced in Asia, exactly what it could be good for. There may have been other things that he brought back that we don't even know about. I was just talking about some of the highlights, but he did bring back a cornucopia of inventions and concepts. One of the things he didn't bring back, I don't think, was Chinese or Asian literature. It would have been interesting if he did, but he didn't.

And again, keep in mind, this is pre-Kootenberg. So this is a sea change, somewhat analogous to the computer era, everything, the way information is shared, the sheer amount of data, the speed of transmission. Lutlberg was the first bump up from a relatively primitive system, and Marco Polo was still in that relatively primitive age of very slow transmission. And how important do you think it was? You mentioned earlier that he seemed to have quite a good deal of empathy with the people that he encountered and the cultures that he came across. how important do you think that was in the success of his story in his later fame?

Because I think we have an impression of medieval people, particularly from the West, whenever they interact with the East, being really resistant and, you know, thinking they're not as good as Christian ideas in the West. So we should shun all of that. And it's quite striking that Marco is willing to just take all of this on board and bring it home with him. Yeah, you're right about that. We also have some accounts, for example, by Christian missionaries,

and they don't have Marco Polo's empathy, and they see things in a very dogmatic way according to their beliefs and what they know or think they know is absolutely right. And I think it's because Marko Polo left at a young age and his sense of the world was still forming. And he had this empathy, which really distinguished him from other people. And it's also part of his unique gift that when he came back to Venice after this interlude in Genoa. He was not greeted exactly as a sage. The few accounts that we have, he seemed a bit like he was a fish out of water. He didn't really belong in the East or the West. He was married. He had children and he had a family, but he was known as being somewhat cranky.

And it's kind of hard to imagine a cranky Marco Polo. If you've ever come back home after a long vacation, two piles of dirty laundry or something like that, Maybe that's an analogy that gives some sense that he was now really not that much at home in Venice. Yeah. And what happened to Marco Polo after he got home? So how long does he live as a Venetian? You mentioned that he's quite well known in his own lifetime. Does he become a famous kind of wealthy person? No, particularly wealthy. He became pretty well known. He was also considered a big liar because of the tales that he told. And some people, I think, took his stories for what they were, which was legitimate, I think. think his reputation, especially increased over time. But it took a while for the manuscripts of

his account that he had dictated to Rosacello Pisa to spread around the world. So Marco Polo was generally considered a bit of a crank when he came back. I wonder whether that response that he got when he got home is more in line with that medieval mind that we imagine where he's saying, you know, everything in the East is much better than it is here. They're better at a lot of things. and everyone say, no, no, that can't be true. That can't possibly be right. One thing I found about the period that we call medieval, you know, we tend to boil it down to a few two-dimensional things. I found it was really much more complex and nuanced than we see in retrospect. And we invent convenient historical categories, medieval and Renaissance.

In reality, I think, is you go through the documents carefully, you try and experience through the eyes of the participants, they didn't. and say, oh, gosh, now we're the medieval era. Oh, we're so now. We can't go anywhere. They didn't look at it that way. Someday people look at our era in a way that would seem strange to us. So their perceptions really varied. Venice, as it happened, was a fairly because it was a trading place

and because it was a culture that subsisted basically on theft, on stolen goods from the east, was much more worldly than many other areas, which tended to be somewhat isolated. We live in a world today where we think everything is always moving forward and we're always making progress, but we don't allow that people 800 years ago may well have felt exactly the same. They felt like they were living in a modern world that's moving forward and making progress. We don't think we're a backward people who in 500 years people will laugh at us for being simple. That's just not the way human beings exist in the world that we live in, is it?

I often say, you know, in 500 years, what will people make of the fact that we drive around cars, that we know are bad for the atmosphere, but we do it anyway? We'll be judged for that kind of thing in the same way that we judge people from history, so we should perhaps be kinder to them, so people will be kinder to us. Yes. It's hard to be kind to some people who seem to us to be, you know, brutal. But I think who look kind of in the Mongols in many ways can strike people now as being rather enlightened and peaceful. And when I was researching this book, I spent a fair amount of time in Mongolia, which is in some ways not that different from the way it was in Marco Polo's time.

People live in these Gurr camps. There aren't that many cars, but it's basically a horseback. based culture as it was in Kubla Koubrikan of Marco Polo's day. There's a generosity there, which is remarkable. Strangers drive up to an isolated tent in the middle of nowhere. The family that lives there will take you in. They will feed you. You can stay there for as long as you want until you go on your way. It's a different kind of society. Also, the absence of private property makes a big difference. So it's a different kind of mindset. Now, there were other areas he came through, which he writes about, which were very dangerous. He was very lucky to avoid various diseases that fell many others. And he was probably very, very clever. I would say, oh, I wish we had more

about him in his own words. We have this very long manuscript in his own words. But I find him an endlessly fascinating character. Yeah, I think anyone who grows up in Venice, but then can move to China and engage with several people around that region, as you say, with different languages, having to learn all of these different languages, how to exist in these different cultures, shows a great degree of intelligence, I would have thought, but also with the empathy and emotional intelligence, and bringing those two things together must have made him quite a person, I would imagine. Yes, yes, yes, I agree, that's true.

And so, I mean, I was going to end on a question that we've sort of already touched on about the controversy around Marco Polo, whether he really went where he said he did or whether he made a lot of it up because it misses out things like the Great Wall, which you've explained perfectly well. And I think it's interesting that you've kind of answered my question by saying that Marco seems to have gone to a lot of these places, but he may well have gathered stories from other people as he was traveling and perhaps pass them off as having experienced them himself. So perhaps that's the lens that we should view it through. Rather than saying he didn't go and he made it up or he just collected stories, it was part of his travels and part of his experience was hearing other people's experiences too. Yes. He was not the only one writing in this kind of hybrid way of partly his own experiences and partly things that he learned or overheard.

Again, it takes a while for us modern readers, contemporary readers, to kind of click into his mindset and see what he's doing. Yeah. Just to end on, what do you wish you knew about Marco Polo that we don't know? I wanted to know more about his love life because he's very circumspect about it. We do know when he was married and had kids when he got back to Venice, but we don't know what he was doing during all these formative years. You can infer perhaps a little bit here, a little bit there, but anything that you do is,

seems really going out on a limb to try and guess what was going on. We do know that Kubla Khan had many wives, for example, to what extent was Marco Polo, what we would call a libertine, or not an interest in conventional monogamy. We just don't know. So I wish I knew more about that. We don't really know much about his father and uncle. We know a few things, but we don't hear, after all, they went.

This was their second trip. So they really had a storehouse of experience, but they didn't write their accounts, which makes one wonder all those other people who went, who never wrote about it. So anyway, I think maybe the fact that he had Rusticello and Pisa and the man he went, and that he was literally locked up with him, encouraged him to do that. If it hadn't been for that odd circumstance, we really probably wouldn't have Marco Polo's travels. Yeah, it's incredible to wonder what experiences have been lost to us, that unusual series of events didn't play out in many other cases.

But I guess we're lucky that we do have Marco Polo's account to entertain and inform us. Well, thank you so much for joining us to explain all of that, Larry. It's been absolutely great to have a wonder around Marco Polo's experiences in the East. Thanks, Matt. It's great talking with you. If that's wet your appetite, then Lawrence's book, Marco Polo from Venice to Zanadu is available anywhere that you get your books from. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time. for more on the greatest period in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us

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