Asia Of Marco Polo
Asia Of Marco Polo
In the year 1295 A. D., after an absence of twenty-four years, Maffeo, Nicolo, and Marco Polo returned to their hometown of Venice, Italy. The Polo trio looked like strangers to their fellow citizens: they wore bizarre and ragged clothes and spoke in an accented tongue. It is said that their own family neither recognized nor acknowledged them due to their foreign appearance.
Marco, having left Venice as a young man of 17, was now 41 years old. He had spent most of his life traveling in Asia. Having spent so much of his life in the Orient, Marco must have experienced an extreme culture shock upon returning to his homeland. While in Asia during the voyages to and from China, Marco Polo saw vast numbers of different lands and lifestyles. His Venetian upbringing gave him a unique perspective on Asian civilization.
A few years after his return to Venice in 1295, Marco found himself aboard a Venetian ship under the post of gentleman-commander during a regional war between Venice and Genoa. The ship was captured by the Genoese fleet and Marco consequently spent the next few years, until May of 1299, in a Genoa prison. It was during this period that Marco found the time to dictate, possibly with the help of notes taken during his voyage, the story of his years abroad. Rustigielo, a citizen of Pisa and fellow prisoner of Marco, took down Marco's story. The book was dictated in prison and copied by hand, as the technology of mass printing had not yet immigrated to Europe from China. As a consequence, there exist today many versions, translations, and reconstructions of the Rustigielo transcript.
Polo's book, entitled The Description of the World, covers the area from Constantinople to Japan to Siberia to Africa. Because these locations are told in the third-person, the exact route of Marco Polo is not known. Instead of narrating the journey of the Polos, the book contains historical observations and detailed descriptions of cultures and geography. For this reason Marco Polo's accounts can be used to re-examine the history of China.
Details that the young Polo observed included regional histories, descriptions of cities, architecture, inhabitants, races, languages and governments. Also described are peoples' different lifestyles, diets, style of dress, marriage customs, rituals, and religions. There are further accounts of the trading practices, crafts, manufactured products, plants, animals, minerals, and terrain. Such a diverse...