Italian Trader at the Court of Kublai Khan
At the height of the Mongol Empire, Marco Polo served Emperor Kublai Khan in China and returned to Venice to write an account of his experiences that would give Europeans some of their earliest information about China.
In the 13th century, people who lived in Venice, Italy, believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth and that creation occurred exactly 4,484 years before Rome was founded. As Christians, they considered Jerusalem, the place of Jesus’s crucifixion, to be the so-called navel of the world, and their maps portrayed this.
Marco Polo was born in Venice, or possibly Croatia, in 1254. Located on the eastern coast of Italy, Venice served as a gateway to the riches of Asia during this era of increasing trade. Goods flowed like water through the city. Ships from around the eastern Mediterranean docked at its port. Merchants and traders set sail from Venice for Constantinople (now Istanbul) and the Black Sea to fetch goods from Russia and from merchants who traveled the Silk Roads, a system of trading routes to and from China that crossed the mountains and deserts of Central Asia.
At the time of Marco’s birth, his father, Niccolo, and two uncles, all merchants, were away trading. Supposedly they were visiting cities on the Black Sea, but their adventures had actually taken them all the way to the Mongol capital of China, Khanbaliq (city of the Khan). There they had an audience with the most powerful ruler of the day, Kublai Khan, grandson of the founding emperor, Genghis Khan. When the three Polo men returned to Venice after an absence of 16 years, Niccolo found that his wife had died and that he had a 15-year-old son, Marco, whom he did not know existed.
Travels
Two years later, in 1271, Niccolo Polo and his brother, Maffeo, set off again, taking the 17-year-old Marco with them. This time they aimed directly for the court of Kublai Khan, to bring him documents from the pope and holy oil from Jerusalem that he had requested. Even with a gold passport from Kublai Khan, which enabled the travelers to use lodgings and horses posted by the Mongols along the Silk Road routes, they took three and a half years to arrive. Upon reaching the summer palace of Kublai Khan in 1275, Niccolo presented his son and offered him in service to the emperor.
