Exploring the medieval world with Marco Polo

Summary

History Extra Podcast Summary: Exploring the Medieval World with Marco Polo

Episode Overview

• Title: Exploring the Medieval World with Marco Polo
• Host: Emily Briffitt
• Guest: Sharon Kinoshita, Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz
• Release Date: July 8, 2025

This episode delves into the life and legacy of Marco Polo, the 13th-century Venetian merchant known for his extensive travels across Asia and his influential manuscript, commonly referred to as "Marco Travels." Sharon Kinoshita provides a comprehensive analysis of Polo's work, its historical context, and its enduring impact on our understanding of the medieval world.

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1. Introduction to Marco Polo

Emily Briffitt sets the stage by introducing Marco Polo as a renowned Venetian merchant whose journeys along the Silk Road and time spent at the court of Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan have inspired countless travelers and historians.

Key Quote:

"Marco Polo is a name that I'm sure many of our listeners will have heard of, but how much do we actually know about the man himself."
— Sharon Kinoshita [02:29]

2. Marco Polo’s Biography

Sharon Kinoshita provides a succinct biography, highlighting that Marco Polo was born around 1254 and died in 1324. He embarked on his journey to Asia at 17, accompanied by his father and uncle, eventually spending over two decades at Kublai Khan's court before returning to Venice in 1295.

Key Points:

• Early Life: Born circa 1254 in Venice.
• Journey to Asia: Traveled with his father and uncle at age 17.
• Time in Asia: Spent approximately 25 years in the Mongol Empire.
• Return to Venice: Came back in 1295; captured by Genoese four years later.
• Authorship: Collaborated with Rustichello of Pisa during captivity to write "Description of the World."

Key Quote:

"We actually know tantalizingly little about Marco Polo. He left, you know, very few documents."
— Sharon Kinoshita [02:37]

3. The Travels and Their Content

Kinoshita discusses the nature of Polo's manuscript, clarifying that it is better titled "Description of the World" than "Travels." The book comprises 233 chapters, with only the first 19 detailing the journey itself. The majority serves as an ethnographic account of various kingdoms and cities across Asia.

Key Points:

• Original Title: "La Discription du Monde" (Description of the World).
• Structure: 233 chapters; detailed descriptions rather than a continuous narrative.
• Content Focus: Ethnography, administrative structures, and regional overviews.

Key Quote:

"It's modeled or, you know, the closest equivalent that we have is not anything that comes out of Western Europe, but in fact comes out of the Arabo Islamic tradition."
— Sharon Kinoshita [06:26]

4. Descriptions of the Mongol Empire and Kublai Khan

Marco Polo's accounts heavily feature the Mongol Empire, particularly the reign of Kublai Khan. Kinoshita explains how Polo portrays Khan as the greatest ruler, reflecting the administrative prowess and expansive infrastructure of the empire, such as the relay postal system.

Key Points:

• Mongol Conquests: Enabled vast connectivity across Asia.
• Kublai Khan’s Court: Central to Polo’s narratives, showcasing wealth and power.
• Infrastructure: Advanced systems like the relay postal service facilitated Polo’s travels.

Key Quote:

"He calls him the greatest ruler in men and power and riches, and all of this since the time of Adam, our first father."
— Sharon Kinoshita [10:34]

5. Commerce and Trade in Polo’s Writings

Polo's observations on commerce are detailed, focusing on trade infrastructure, customs duties, and the origins of luxury goods like spices and silk. Kinoshita highlights Polo's interest in the logistics of trade within the Mongol Empire and its impact on Venetian merchants.

Key Points:

• Trade Infrastructure: Locations of merchant quarters and customs rates.
• Luxury Goods: Detailed origins of spices, silk, and other commodities.
• Economic Insights: Reflects the interconnectedness of global trade networks.

Key Quote:

"Anything that he and his reading audience would have been familiar with from Venice or the Mediterranean would have passed through the hands of countless middlemen."
— Sharon Kinoshita [17:20]

6. Descriptions of the Natural World

Polo’s vivid descriptions of fauna and flora stand out in his work. Kinoshita compares Polo's firsthand observations with the more rigid, classical descriptions of European scholars, emphasizing Polo's unique perspective unbound by traditional academic constraints.

Key Points:

• Animal Diversity: Detailed accounts of various species, such as different types of sheep and the misinterpretation of unicorns.
• Natural Observations: Contrasts with European scholarly works like Brunetto Latini's "Book of Treasure."
• Unique Insights: Polo documents real animals misunderstood by Europeans as mythical creatures.

Key Quote:

"Marco Polo never mentions the continents. He just again, gives these kingdoms and provinces and so on and so forth."
— Sharon Kinoshita [37:30]

7. Reception and Authenticity Debates

The episode addresses the longstanding debates over the authenticity of Polo's accounts. While some critics question the accuracy due to inconsistencies in place names and itineraries, scholars specializing in Chinese history largely affirm the reliability of his descriptions, especially regarding the Mongol administration and cultural practices.

Key Points:

• Authenticity Challenges: Doubts based on geographical inaccuracies and implausible itineraries.
• Scholarly Consensus: Many experts validate the accuracy of Polo’s detailed cultural and administrative observations.
• Place Names: Persian names often used, reflecting the multilingual nature of the Mongol Empire.

Key Quote:

"The more we learn about the actual situation on the ground in the Mongol Empire, the more we can say that Marco really knew what he was talking about."
— Sharon Kinoshita [28:08]

8. Afterlives of Marco Polo’s Text

Since its creation, Marco Polo’s work has been romanticized and adapted in various forms, from adventurous novels to modern-day explorations. While some interpretations emphasize exotic and orientalist themes, others embark on replicating Polo’s journey, reaffirming the text’s foundational role in travel literature.

Key Points:

• Romanticizations: Novels and films often embellish Polo’s adventures.
• Modern Explorations: Motorcycle trips and expeditions inspired by Polo's routes.
• Orientalist Critiques: Discussions on Polo as an early orientalist figure, though Kinoshita contends this view oversimplifies his nuanced observations.

Key Quote:

"Because Marco says nothing about his day to day personal life during these couple of decades, you have on the one hand that, on the other hand you have adventurers who follow Marco's trail."
— Sharon Kinoshita [33:27]

9. Insights on the Global Middle Ages

Kinoshita emphasizes that Polo’s travels highlight the interconnectedness of the medieval world, challenging the notion of historical isolation. His work illustrates early forms of globalization, showcasing the extensive trade networks and cultural exchanges that existed long before the modern era.

Key Points:

• Global Networks: Pre-modern globalization through expansive trade and communication networks.
• Cultural Exchange: Mutual influences between different regions within the Mongol Empire.
• Challenging Preconceptions: Polo’s work dispels myths of a segmented medieval world, revealing a more interconnected and diverse global landscape.

Key Quote:

"Marco Polo is a good reminder that for all we tout modern globalization, there have been many versions of it all along."
— Sharon Kinoshita [37:30]

10. Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Sharon Kinoshita urges listeners to appreciate the uniqueness of Marco Polo’s narrative, distinct from the predominantly Latin, scholarly texts of the Middle Ages. She underscores the importance of recognizing the diversity and continuity in historical cultures and warns against the diminishing emphasis on historical studies in contemporary education.

Key Points:

• Unique Perspective: Marco Polo offers a non-institutionalized view of the medieval world.
• Diversity and Continuity: Emphasis on the varied and interconnected nature of medieval cultures.
• Educational Importance: Highlighting the necessity of historical knowledge in understanding present-day dynamics.

Key Quote:

"I would just like to have people have a sense of the kind of diversity of the world, which is what he emphasizes, and the kinds of continuities of these strains of culture."
— Sharon Kinoshita [40:39]

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Final Thoughts This episode of the History Extra podcast provides an in-depth exploration of Marco Polo's contributions to our understanding of the medieval world. Through Sharon Kinoshita's expert analysis, listeners gain a nuanced perspective on Polo's travels, his detailed observations, and the enduring significance of his writings in the broader context of global history.

Transcript

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[Emily Briffitt]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. You may be familiar with the name Marco Polo, the 13th century Venetian merchant who traveled through Asia along the Silk Road and spent time at the court of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. Famously, he documented his experiences in a detailed account that's inspired many travelers since. In today's episode, Emily Briffitt speaks to Sharon Kinoshita to follow in Polo's footsteps, exploring the medieval world through through his eyes.

[Sharon Kinoshita]

Marco Polo is a name that I'm sure many of our listeners will have heard of, but how much do we actually know about the man himself.

We actually know tantalizingly little about Marco Polo. He left, you know, very few documents. There are very few points in the historical record from his lifetime. He left a will, so we know what he had at his death. And then there are several legal type papers, contracts and so forth, less from him than from of his family during his lifetime. But aside from that, we know very little, which is, I think, why it's a blank slate that imaginative novelists and filmmakers have been able to fill in with all sorts of romantic adventures about his time away traveling in Asia.

Now, I was going to ask you to provide a brief biography to him. This is, from what you've said, going to be very brief. Could you just introduce us to what we do know about Marco Polo?

Well, we know that he was born in about 1254 and that he died in 1324. He left home in the company of his father and uncle at the age of about 17, and he traveled with them to the court of the great Khan Khubilai, where his father and uncle had been several years before. So he spent a little over two decades away from home and then returned to Venice in 1295 again in the company of of his father and uncle. And then four years later, he found himself a prisoner of the Genoese, who were the great enemies, the great rivals of the Venetians. And it was there in Genoese captivity that he collaborated with another prisoner who came from Pisa, Genoa's other great rival, Rustichello of Pisa, who's known as an author of Arthurian romance, actually. And they collaborated to produce the book that we now know generally as Marco Travels, but as I have been insisting would better be known by their title of the Description of the World.

Why has this book come to be known as the Travels and not by its original name?

It was composed first of all in French, not in Italian, even though the two co authors were Italian. The original title in French was La Discription du Monde, which simply translates Description of the World. How did it become known as the Travels? It's kind of a long story, but I think that a key moment comes in the mid 16th century when it was published in print in Italian translation by a Venetian publisher who was putting out a series of, I think we can call them travel or exploratory narratives. And we have to remember that mid 16th century we're squarely in the age of so called exploration. And then so because it's included in a series on travels and navigations, it was easy, I think, to subsume it under the title Travels. The second thing is that between Marco's original text in 1298 and the publication of this Italian print version, there had been many, many translations, adaptations, et cetera, and many additions to the text. So many legends that we have no attestation for in Marco lifetime. But, you know, legends such as the fact that when someone marveled at how much Marco told in his book, he said something like, I haven't told the smallest part of the millions of adventures that I underwent. So this accounts for the most popular Italian title of the book, which is Il Million the Millions.

If listeners were to read, well, I guess a version of this, what could they expect? Is it a dramatic narrative? Is it more of a travel guide, as one of the titles might suggest?

I think that people who actually pick the book up looking for adventures are bound to be disappointed. The book consists of about 233 chapters, most of them quite short. But out of the 233, only chapters 1 through 19 give an overview of the travels. First of all of Marco's father and uncle, and second of all of the three of them together, their journey out, their journey back, etc. Etc. Most of the rest of the book is devoted to what that original title implies, a description of the world. So my take is that it's modeled or, you know, the closest equivalent that we have is not anything that comes out of Western Europe, but in fact comes out of the Arabo Islamic tradition. There's a genre that modern scholars have dubbed the books of routes and kingdoms. And I think Marco Polo's book really resembles those in that what he's interested in is giving you a kind of kingdom by kingdom or province by province and later city by city account of what you might find in Asia. But the important thing is he was away for over 20 years. It's not a single itinerary. So you can't map. You can't even take the places that he describes and map them in a single trajectory, because if you try, you just think, oh my gosh, this guy's hopelessly confused. And that's caused some of the doubts that have arisen about the authenticity of his knowledge and his manuscript.

And that's something that we'll definitely come onto later. But to situate ourselves first, could you just give us an idea of some of these kingdoms and cities that he does cover in this book?

Of course. The background historical event that has facilitated or made possible that travels in the first place are the Mongol conquests that begin basically in the early 13th century. And culminate with the conquests of Chinggis Khan and his couple of generations of his successors, and then Khubilai Khan, who takes power in what we would today call China in about 1260. So it's the fact that the Mongols assembled this empire that if you open a history book, it'll say the largest contiguous empire ever known. And it really does stretch from the Pacific to well into Eastern Europe. So this sets the stage for the connectivity going all across Asia. And it also, you know, the distinctiveness of the Mongols is, of course, they begin as a warrior, nomadic confederation that just mushrooms spectacularly across Asia and conquers a good deal of territory with a good deal of violence. And scholars are now reassessing their accomplishments. Of course, the two great sedentary empires that they conquer are China on the one hand, and Persia or the Abbasid Caliphate on the other hand. So the rulers in those subsections of the empire very quickly adapt to being imperial rulers, you know, creating a kind of huge and well ordered empire which facilitates the travel of people like the Polos.

As Marco Polo spends a good deal of time in the court of Kublai Khan, it's little wonder that the Khan's empire features so heavily in his work. What does Marco Polo tell us about the Mongols?

He tells us a fair amount, but actually, in the couple of decades preceding Marco Polo's journey, Western European powers, notably the Pope and the King of France, had sent Franciscans as emissaries to the Mongols. So those were really expeditions of first contact. And the two of those Franciscans had each composed a description of their journeys in Latin. And they had A good deal of their accounts are devoted to a kind of ethnography describing the Mongols by then still nomadic ways, what their tent cities were like, what they ate, something of, their social structure, and so on and so forth. So by the time we get to Marco Polo, that kind of information wouldn't have constituted news for his audience back home in Latin Europe. What he does focus on is the greatness of Khubilai Khan, and, in fact, the book itself. The original title is the Description of the World, but subsequent medieval manuscripts have a couple of different prominent titles, and one of them is the Book of the Great Khan, because it really features Khubilai front and center. In fact, when he comes to describing Khubilai, he calls him the greatest ruler in men and power and riches, and all of this since the time of Adam, our first father. So, you know, no mention of Alexander the Great or Caesar or Charlemagne. It's just Kublai Khan since the time of Adam.

How then does his time with Kublai Khan and the Mongols influence Marco Polo?

One thing I didn't say, maybe in the original description of Marco Polo, is that of course, he comes from a family of Venetian merchants, and so his father and uncle originally travel east because they see greater and greater opportunities for trade. And one thing about the Mongols is that for all their reputation for warfare and violence, they know what side the bread is buttered on. And so they are totally eager to encourage commerce. And in fact, this is how they derive a good deal of their wealth after the original phase of conquest. Kubilai Khan just dominates everything in Marco's vision. Of course, you know, you can never separate any text, medieval or modern, from the circumstances of its composition. So Marco's ability to travel around the empire is certainly facilitated by what seems to be his insertion into the Mongol bureaucracy. The splash that his story makes back home is certainly inseparable from how spectacular he can make the Great Khan and the empire. Although I have to say, it doesn't take too much exaggeration to really emphasize the astonishing scale and outsized power of Kubilai Khan. So, yeah, I think that that Khubilai Khan is totally formative, totally central, as I say. And even the parts of the description of the parts of empire that Khubilai rules, for example, the famous relay system, postal system, basically an early version of the Pony Express, where riders can travel astonishing distances very quickly. I mean, that's a feature of empire, part of the infrastructure. But it all speaks to the greatness of Khubilai Khan.

Are there any other particular features that really emphasize this greatness?

Well, the wealth of the cities is something that Marco as a merchant is very interested in. So a crucial point comes in the late 1270s, and this is after Marco and his father and uncle have already arrived in Khubilai's empire. But it's at that point that the Mongols complete the conquest of the Southern Sun Empire, what we would now call Southern China. This is by far the wealthiest part of China because it has tremendous big cities, the capital city of modern day Hangzhou, and port cities that are responsible for trade with Southeast Asia, South Asia and beyond. So for Marco, just the extent of wealth, the quantity of the commodities flowing in and out of this port is just in scale. It just blows out of the water. Anything that he and his reading audience would have been familiar with from Venice or the Mediterranean.

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[Sharon Kinoshita]

Of course, as a merchant, a huge thing in Marco's work is matters relating to commerce. What does he tell us about this world of trading and commerce?

In his work, he pays attention to the infrastructure. So for example, in a couple of these big cities, he'll tell us where the quarters are, where the foreign merchants are located. He's very interested in customs duty rates, where you get a favorable rate, and especially how much money the Great Khan rakes off from this tremendous commerce once he gets into the Indian Ocean. And he probably became familiar with a lot of these spots firsthand on his return journey from the Mongol Empire back to Venice via the Indian Ocean maritime route. He really points out the points of origin of a lot of the commodities and notably spices, which of course is a large part of what drives European merchants to take an interest in the east in the first place. So it's kind of ironic because I think for the modern reader going through chapter after chapter, in this place you have pepper and clove and silk, and then the next place you have pepper and cloves and nutmeg. I mean, I think it kind of numbs the brain after a little while. But I think that for a contemporary audience this would have been fascinating because these are all the luxury goods that typically European Italian merchants like the Venetians and the Genoese would have accessed in ports like Alexandria in modern day Egypt, or Acre, which is the seaport of modern day Jerusalem. And it would have passed through the hands of countless middlemen. And the Latin European, the Christian merchants would have acquired them from probably Muslim, Arab or Persian merchants. And so to actually learn the origin, the sources of these commodities, I think would have been a big thrill.

Another thing that's quite charming about the work is, is how he enthuses about the animal life of different areas. What are some aspects of the natural world that he comes across on his travels?

He loves the variety of animals and notably he frequently says sheep in this area or the birds are nothing like ours, they're different. And diversity diversite is one of the huge leitmotifs of Marco's world. The diversity of the world, the diversity of flora and fauna. So rather than, and I like to compare it, for example, there's a bighorn sheep in the mountains of Central Asia that today is called Marco Polo sheep because he wrote so enthusiastically about it. In other places, for example, there's a fat tailed sheep which is good eating. And I think to understand the significance of Marco's noting of the great diversity even among sheep would be to think of what the learned discourse would have been like back home. So I like to compare him to not his countrymen, but a Florentine, Brunetto Latini, who's best known because he makes an appearance in Dante's Inferno. But Brunetto Latini also composed in French like Marco and Rustichello. And most famously he composed a kind of encyclopedic work called the Book of Treasure. Now in his encyclopedia he's drawing, you can tell, I mean, he didn't go out in the field and look at sheep and write down observations. He did what scholars did in medieval Europe, which is to read his good Latin sources. So drawing on previous writers, especially old Roman Latin sources, his sheep is pretty standard. I mean, there's one kind of sheep, it can be black or white, it has this and that characteristic. But he makes no attempt to take on board the variety of different kinds of sheep that certainly would have existed even within Latin Europe. Marco, on the other hand, he's not educated in that classical, learned manner. And that's for me, the huge advantage of his work. He's not bound by what Pliny said or what some other learned source said, he's just looking at the sheep and going, they're different, they're magnificent.

Are there any particular stories or descriptions that you find particularly fascinating or vivid?

There are a couple of wonderful moments where his descriptions directly take aim at what educated Europeans would thought. So for example, he says unicorns are not the way that we say they are. They are in fact big and ugly and they have feet like elephant and a single horn. So of course what he's describing is a rhinoceros, this single horned creature. But the only version that would have entered the minds of Latin Europeans would have been unicorns that we now see as mythical beasts. So for us, believing in unicorns would seem naive. Whereas here you have a description of a rhinoceros. Of course we understand what that is. I think in Marco Polo's day, for much of his audience the valences would have been completely opposite. So it would be, well, who is this guy that doesn't know what a unicorn is? And therefore his description of a rhinoceros would have been ammunition to dismiss the veracity of his tale because it did not confirm the learned authorities that everyone else drew from. The other point of kind of demystification is the salamander, because learned discourse confused a salamander with what we know today to be asbestos. So it took an animal and it survives in fire, for example, untouched. So Marco Polo says, no, no, what we say about salamander is all wrong. In fact, this is how it's mined, this is how it's processed. And interestingly, he says he rarely injects his own self, the I. But he says, I know this because I learned it from my companion, a Turk, and he gives his proper name, Tsufika. And he says, this guy was the governor for several years of the province where salamander is mined. I can tell you that this is the true story, it's not what we say about salamanders. So there's all this demystification or myth busting about what Latin Europe holds and will continue to hold for quite some time to be the scientific truth.

With his demystification and his really vivid descriptions and his also notes about where you can find certain commodities. How did his contemporaries find his work? What was the reception?

That's a good question. I think first of all, when he pinpointed the sources of all of these commodities, I think we have to consider it not as this revelation of oh, this is information we want everyone to know, but it's more like secret intel for the Venetians to Know that over and against. You want to keep that as much as you can for yourself. Because at the very same time that Marco and his father and uncle were journeying east, so were Genoese making inroads, for example into Mongol ruled Persia. They were helping the ruler of that sub empire build a navy and they were actively trading. So on the one hand the Persian Mongols and Khubilai were closely allied, but on the other hand the Venetian and the Genoese, although they're involved in similar ventures, they're bitter rivals. The other thing is that the people who did jump on Marco's account right away were church people. So at just about the same time as the first copies of Marco Polo's manuscripts were done in Franco Italian, this Italianate French, there was also a translation into Latin which was done by a Dominican friar. So again in the Middle Ages when people translated, it was rarely a word for word translation, rather it was always adapted into whatever the new circumstances would be most interested in. So of course for missionaries, first of all they would look askance at Marco's pretty neutral description of non Christians, Saracens, that is Muslims, idolaters, that is to say everyone who wasn't from one of the three Abrahamic religions. So under idolater he lumps together Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, etc, etc, and so for the mendicant orders they would have been most interested in can we convert these people, how can we reach them? And so therefore a lot of stuff about trade is less interesting, a lot of stuff about religious practices is more interesting, and a lot of kind of derogatory comments on the foreign practices and customs that Marco notes work their way into the text, with the result that for many English translations which kind of incorporate several of these different layers of translation, Marco's text can seem much more hostile to Asian quote unquote, others than the earliest surviving version actually is.

Now with that, I guess this brings us onto this debate surrounding accuracy, authenticity and also I guess maybe an element of glamorization of Marco Polo's work. Could you just touch on the broader themes of the debates?

Because of how extravagant Marco Polo's descriptions are, people have from time to time cast doubt on the so called authenticity of his account. And notably a book several years ago asked, did Marco Polo go to China? So first of all, first of all, let me say that scholars, especially scholars of China, have written back and they are totally convinced of the authenticity and moreover of the accuracy of some of the most minute aspects of Marco Polo's accounts of different aspects of Chinese culture. Mongol administrative practices, etc. Etc. So, so one of the features of the text that people have used to cast doubt on the authenticity is the fact that many of the place names that he records are not accurate in the sense that they are not Chinese place names and in fact many of them are Persian. So first of all, I think that the question did Marco Polo go to China? I think if you asked him, he would say no. I think for Marco Polo he was not going to China, of which Latin Europeans had only the vaguest notion in his day, he was going to the Mongol Empire. So that his version of the lands he visited would have been filtered through, first of all, Mongol eyes. Second of all, I think Marco, to the extent that if it's true that he in fact was in the service of Khubilai Khan, he would have been a member of this vast kind of second tier class within the Mongol Empire, which was called Semurin. Varied peoples, and these are the non Mongol peoples whose expertise the Mongols drew on basically as bureaucrats to run their empire. So mainly Turks I would think, but Persians, Arabs, etc. So even though coming from the modern west, we would tend to see Latin Europeans in contrast to, for example, Muslim Persians and Arabs, within the 13th century world of the Mongol Empire, this was a natural place where they would have fit. And you know, to refer back to the example I gave of his reference to my companion, a learned Turk, right. And Persian actually was a sort of lingua franca for commerce across much of Asia. So I think it's natural that Marco would have known Persian. He probably would have frequented again, this class of bureaucrats whose first or certainly second language might have been Persian. And for example, when students raise this issue in class, I say, well, how many of you have been to Florence, Italy? And several of them raise their hands and I say, you lie, because otherwise you would say Firenze. Right? But the fact that you use a non indigenous place name is not any indication that you don't know that place intimately. So I think the other thing is that I mentioned before, if you try to trace Marco Polo's, you know, the places that he maps in a single itinerary, you can't do it. And it's all messed up because that's what happens when you have the model of a travel narrative of someone who goes to someplace, goes out and back, and they include a map. And I went here and I went there. But Marco, two decades in the east, and so what he did often is to follow administrative routes, which means that you'd go to the major city in such and such a province, and then the administrative route would take you out to different, smaller places, like spokes on a wheel. You'd go out to this place, you'd come back to the major city, then go out to the next place. So you can't map that in a single itinerary. And so I think that this misunderstanding has caused people to say, well, his geography is all messed up. So, you know, obviously he's either making things up or he's an unreliable narrator, all this kind of stuff. But I think the more we learn about the actual situation on the ground in the Mongol Empire, the more we can say that. Yes. Yeah. Obviously when you do things like report on the number of bridges in a city or the amount of pepper that flows in and out, I think even in the modern day it would be hard to get those things right. So obviously there's room for slippage with factual and especially quantitative detail. But I think in general, Marco really, the more we learn, the more we're secure in saying he knew what he was talking about.

Thank you. Since Marco Polo's work's creation, it seems to have lived many afterlives. How has the text been seen, understood and used since that time?

It's very interesting because there's a kind of split, I would say. And on the one hand, you know, the romanticizations of his experience in novels, you know, I mean, anytime you have a fictionalized treatment of Marco Polo, of course he has to have, for example, many sexual adventures all over Asia. And, you know, he probably did, but he doesn't talk about those. Oh, except he notes a couple of places in, for example, in Tibet where he says the custom is for the community or men to give their women or their wives to travelers. And this is a good thing for, you know, young men between the ages of this and that. So people have jumped on that as evidence of the kind of proto orientalist features of Marco Polo where you're just looking for the European foreigner. Asia is a kind of playground for libertine behavior. But aside from that, because Marco says nothing about his day to day personal life during these couple of decades, you have on the one hand that, on the other hand you have adventurers who follow Marco Polo. Quite a few people have set out on the trail of Marco Polo. And I'd have to say, by and large, they too come away convinced of the authenticity of Marco's account. Including some places in Southeast Asia, for example, southwestern China, you know, finding tribes whose customs still resemble stuff being described in Marco's work. If you search online, you can find motorcycle trips that reproduce parts of Marco's trail. Photographers, adventurers, etc. So those are always really fun and exciting to follow. On the other hand, in the scholarly community, and again, in the wake of the enthusiasm for postcolonial studies a couple of decades ago, there was a tendency to jump on Marco Polo as one of the first Orientalists who was doing all this exoticizing. And any notation of difference was taken at superior Western denigration of what he was describing. But I think, first of all, again, a lot of it comes from collating different versions of Marco that span several centuries. And second of all, I think that things are actually reversed and that the scale and the luxury and the difference of much of asia in the 13th century would have totally turned the table. So today there are cities like Hangzhou or Suzhou in China. Suzhou. It's riveted with canals, and so you'll see it described as the Venice of the east. Nonsense. In the 13th century, it would have dwarfed Venice in size and in wealth and in magnificence. So I think when Marco was reporting on all of these features and really emphasizing their greatness and their difference, it really is from the perspective of a kind of awestruck observer. Or to the extent he's not awestruck, it's because he's coming back after 25 years, and. Oh, yeah, I know that. But he's overwhelming his audience with the grandeur of what he's reporting, things that they have not seen.

What then, do you think Marco Polo's book can tell us about the global Middle Ages?

I think one of the great things, first of all, coming right at the middle of this age of Mongol expansionism, it reminds us that for all we tout modern globalization, there have been many versions of it all along. And so, for example, Marco dies in the year 1324. The very next year, 1325, the famous Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta sets off on what will be his journey, where he reaches all the way to Asia, too, and comes back with marvelous adventures. So this just goes to show the kinds of networks that facilitated really expansive travel, the commodities that Marco brings back or talks about, pepper, musk, cloves. You know, more and more research has been coming out just in the past few years documenting how pretty consistent Western or Mediterranean traffic in these goods has been since the time of the Roman Empire. So all of this connectivity is not new. Of course, it assumes different forms in each age, but it just. Marco Polo is A good reminder of that. The other thing is because, as I said, Marco is not learned and therefore does not impose classical conceptions of the world onto his material. Totally absent from his text are distinctions like capital E East and capital W West. Even in learned sources like Brunetto Latini's Encyclopedia, he says, you know, the world is divided into three great land masses, Asia, Europe and Africa. Marco Polo never mentions the continents. He just again, gives these kingdoms and provinces and so on and so forth. So I think that stripping away our preconception of what the Middle Ages, or at least what Marco Polo thought about these differences of peoples, cultures, languages, et cetera, is a useful reminder. And it's especially useful to the extent that there has been a movement among nationalist movements to root claims for specificity and superiority back in the Middle Ages. And so I think I, along with other historians of the Middle Ages, and particularly the global Middle Ages, want to lay the groundwork for disabling that kind of understanding of the Middle Ages and to say, actually there were of lots, lot of competing and sometimes for us, very surprising kinds of perceptions of the world and of different cultures that were much more expansive and much less segmented than we assume that they ought to be.

And as a final question to you, what would you like for listeners to take away from this?

I would like listeners to take away, first of all, the marvel of the text, how distinctive it is. How distinctive it is, first of all, being composed by a Venetian merchant, because most of our concept of the Middle Ages is derived in quite learned fashion by historians who are reading texts in Latin, mainly produced by the powers that be, you know, the church and the state. And because Marco is outside the church and the state and official kinds of learning, he allows us to see what was the reality that's typically absent for us because we simply don't have the sources. And then I would just like to have people have a sense of the kind of diversity of the world, which is what he emphasizes, and the kinds of continuities of these strains of culture, these strains of. Of practices and attitudes that it's too easy to lose, especially to the extent that, sadly, we are now canceling history programs in universities, or people are less and less turned to the past, not as a kind of source of authorization, but just as a source of knowledge about how we got to where we are in the. The present.

[Emily Briffitt]

That was Sharon Kinoshita speaking to Emily Briffett. Sharon is Distinguished professor of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the author of Marco Polo and his world. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

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You know, he would look at these.

[Sharon Kinoshita]

Men and he would say, don't worry, sonny.

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You'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

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