Marco Polo from Venice to Xanadu | Laurence Bergreen | Talks at Google

Very excited to introduce today's visiting author, Larry Bergreen. Mr. Bergreen is an award winning biographer who currently serves as a featured historian for the History Channel and frequently lectures at major universities and symposiums. His previous work includes profiles of Magellan, Louis Armstrong, Al Capone, Irving Berlin and James Agee. He's here today to talk to us about his latest endeavor, a biography of Marco Polo. In Marco Polo From Venice to Xanadu, Birding delves into a rich and otherwise largely unexamined life, highlighting Polo's understanding of of the interconnectedness between exploration and business, a concept very relevant in today's global economy and particularly relevant to us here at Google. Please join me in welcoming Larry Birgren.

Thanks. Thank you, Kristen. Thank you very much. If you can't hear me, just raise your hand and I'll try and raise my voice a little bit more. Thank you for inviting me. I'm delighted to be here today. This book has just been published and so I've just begun to talk about it to people. And Marco Polo is a legendary figure to most people, but he was actually, despite some claims to the contrary over time, a real person who did exist and actually did almost everything he wrote about in his book with a few embellishments. And this is the first book about him in English almost since forever, because people often thought that Marco Polo was a fabulist. And it was a difficult book for people to fathom, even though his name was a synonym for exploration. It's a kind of compendium of his travels throughout Asia and the Middle east from 1271 to 1294. It was five. It was a 24 year odyssey that he started when he was 17 and finished came back to Venice, where he was from when he was 41 years old. And I'll tell you how he came to write the book. But even that was only by the strangest of accidents. It's also filled with all sorts of curiosities and things that people didn't believe. Just seeing all these spiders up here today, which they probably didn't realize, this actually has something to do with Marco Polo because when he got to India, which was another place that he explored, which was unfamiliar to Europeans, he wrote about certain animals by the name of tarantula that infested homes and were considered bad omens for merchants like him. And he portrayed tarantulas as actually being able to cry out and to shriek and it was very unnerving. This was what I meant by the embellishment. He just couldn't leave A good story alone. He had to sort of play it up a little bit. And he talked about how the men built and women beds out of bamboo shoots which were light and that could be raised high off the floor so that they would be away from the walls and the floor and the ceiling where the tarantulas were lurking everywhere. Nevertheless, it was conceal considered a very bad omen to have a tarantula in the room while you were trying to say, do some sort of a deal for gems. Which was mostly his stock in trade while he was abroad with his father and his uncle. What I'd like to do, I have a little PowerPoint slideshow about his travels and some pictures which I think will help us get oriented. He spent 24 years. I'll try and take you through that time in unveiling. So let me know how I'm doing as we go whizzing around the world, starting in Venice. That's obviously the jacket of the book. We have some sound effects that we don't hear here. Have you ever been to Venice? You've seen this famous landmark, which is St. Mark's and it's the spiritual center of Venice. The Venetians were wonderful thieves. And one of the things they stole was the body of St. Mark. And they commissioned some pirates to bring it back. Paid them a lot of money and then made that the sort of spiritual forefather of the city state, which was really a military republic, to give it some sort of legitimacy. They also went to Constantinople in Alexandria, stole a tremendous amount of art. You know, the glass blowing. We always identify with Venice and the island of Murano. They stole those glass blowers and brought them to Venice. So many things about Venice which was a tiny, tiny place, if you've ever been there, you know, you can walk the length and breadth in under half an hour. Were imported. In fact, they were stolen. But legitimacy was conferred over time. Anyway, that was a site familiar to young Marco and this is his house. It's actually a reconstruction of his house, but you can see it there. But it's on the exact lot where the KA Polo, the Polo house has stood for centuries. Why they decided to rebuild it, I'm not sure. But anyway, this was just around the corner from where he lived and a very familiar Venetian scene of gondolas. And you can see how small the. If you haven't been to Venice, how small the scale of the city is just a tiny place with tiny canals and tiny. So he was used to very cramped confines. This was the view out his front Door and you can see, looking just across the canal, you could practically reach out and touch the boats going by as they headed out into the Grand Canal. In his day, these gondolas were built in what was known as the arsenal, the original arsenal, and this was like a precursor of Henry Ford's Model T production line. They were able to turn out a ship in the unheard of time 15 minutes, because they had reduced it to just the essentials so they could turn out warships with extraordinary speed and precision. Of course, they were all the same, and the standardization was a key part of that. This is a painting by Canaletto, an artist who was famous for Venetian scenes. This was the kind of ship which was somewhat larger than the one depicted there that Marco Polo was on. And this led to indirectly writing this book. When he got back to Venice in his early 40s, he was restless and he spent two years. It's not really clear what he was doing, but one of the things he did was lead one of those ships, a galley, into battle against a rival city state of Genoa. They were constantly doing battle, and he was captured, he was put into jail, which was really a palazzo in Venice. And to the best of our knowledge, and there are some variant accounts of what actually happened, was thrown together with a well known, although not particularly skillful, romance writer named Rustichello of Pisa, just going by one named Rusticello. And Marco was known for telling tall tales of his travels around China, which we'll hear about in a minute, and being thrown together with Rusticello, the idea was he was supposed to write it down. Rustichello became his amanuensis, and it's thanks to him that we know about his account. But there are problems. This was pre Gutenberg Europe. Unlike China, which had a very advanced technology, in Europe, it was all manuscripts. The clergy tended to write in Latin and other learned manuscripts were written in French, which was the lingua franca. Rustichello's French wasn't that great. If you've ever taken French or you struggled with French, you know, the tenses can be very difficult. And he had a lot of problems with tenses. Plus he threw in a lot of Pisan words, and the result was kind of a hodgepodge. I call it fractured French. Also, there was no standard or authorized Marco Polo manuscript of his travels, even though it became the most famous and popular travel book ever written. There are actually dozens of different ones in different languages, everything from Gaelic to various Italian dialects, and some are twice as long as others. I used one that I thought was the most Accurate and the most comprehensive, and then, you know, quoted from it judiciously. But we don't have an original manuscript, so it's hard to know what he actually wrote. Also, Rusticello had an annoying habit of putting pieces that he wrote in earlier epics, which were fictional, into Marco Polo's true account to sort of spruce it up. So you also have to do a little separating of wheat from. From chaff, which is not hard to do to figure out what's Marco and what's Rusticello. This is all by way of saying they were not Woodward and Bernstein and they didn't really work together that well. And so the result is a funny. You know, it's a funny kind of unique story. But nevertheless, Marco's spirit does come through once Rusticello kind of lets him have his say. That is. Whoops. That was kind of a quick one. To the best of our knowledge, that's what Marco Polo looked like. There's no portrait of him from life, but this was an early engraving from description, so he might very well have looked like this. So that's the best I can do. And in his day, when he was leaving from Venice, people thought the world looked like this. People didn't know the Pacific Ocean existed. People thought the circumference of the world was about 15,000 miles instead of closer to the atmosphere, actual 25,000 miles. So people's conception of what the world was like was, of course, dramatically inaccurate. And people also thought that Jerusalem existed somewhere, you know, in what we would now think of as being the North Pole, and that there was an actual entrance to hell somewhere down south near the South Pole. There were cosmologists who had a much different worldview, but they were in the academy, and that was a very rarefied stratum, and they just talked to one another. But the person in the street had a view of the world which was derived from a literal interpretation of the Bible. So even though Marco's father and uncle had gone before him and gone all the way to what's now Beijing, to what was then called Cambulac, their knowledge of the world was still very incomplete, especially by modern standards. This is a more accurate idea of the actual Asian continent that they crossed to get to the court of the emperor Kublai Khan, who was the Mongol grandson of Genghis Khan, who had conquered China, and who was then the most powerful ruler in the world, more powerful than any ruler in Europe, more powerful than the Pope, an extraordinary, powerful and mystical person, best known or celebrated in Kubla Khan's. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan. But most people in Europe didn't really know this person existed, or if they did, they just thought he was a fantasy figure. There were others like that at the time. There was a mythical figure of Prester John, who was supposed to be a Christian king in the east, who had a fantastic kingdom. And it was also believed that he was a real person and that if explorers just pushed far enough east, they would eventually connect with Prester John and find this Eastern Christian kingdom. Prester John, as it turned out, was completely fictional. In fact, he was the creation of monks who were amusing themselves, whereas Kublai Khan, who seemed even more fantastic, was a real person. We'll keep going. Early in the journey, Marco had to cross a transitional area known as the Pamir Highlands. And this is somewhat east of Afghanistan. He talked about the atmosphere here being so thin that birds couldn't fly and that you couldn't build a fire. It was very still, very quiet and very cold because the altitude was so high. He was passing through what we now call the roof of the world. It's near the Himalayas, near Mount Everest, and you can get substance. Even today. The most favored method of getting through here is horses or oxen, and you can get a sense of the stark landscape, which hasn't changed from his day. So imagine him as an 18 or 19 year old. Once they finished crossing this intense cold, they descended to the desert of Taklimakan. And this was again another transitional area. And they traveled on camels, just as pictured here in this modern picture. And Marco talks about the caravans and how logically they were organized. They had sort of the medieval equivalent of motels called robots, stationed every few miles along the way, where they were two story affairs. You could tie up the camels and your wildlife, your beasts, whatever you had in the stables down below, and then kind of crawl up a ladder to a room up above where you'd spend the night. And they had some simple food and they'd lock it at night, and you were relatively safe from animals or highwaymen or whatever dangers there were that that were on the Silk Road. The goal of all this traveling, one of the goals was to get to what was the early Mongol capital city. This is a picture I took during my visit there, of Karakorom, or as it's pronounced in Mongolian, Harhorum. The sounds in Mongolian are quite different from sounds in English. Anyway, Karakorom or Harhorum, was the ancient Mongol capital, and it was Kublai Khan who decided to move it to what's now Beijing, both to stake his claim to China and to try and merge the two cultures. The Mongols were somewhat like the American Indians. In fact, there's some genetic similarities and ethnological similarities, but the main point is that they were hunters and they were nomadic and they had winter and summer, different pastures and feeding grounds and places where they lived. And they were constantly on the move and they didn't have a concept of private property. And if that sounds like American Indians, it also describes the Mongols who were accustomed to fantastic deprivations, lived, learned to live off the land and to live off their horses. They were excellent warriors. They, they could sit on a horse at full gallop facing backwards and fire off one arrow after another, and were completely fearless and were able to conquer all of China all the way going west to the Danube River. Europeans thought this was during Genghis Khan's era, before Marco's day, that the Mongols would conquer all of Europe, but they actually just stopped there because they didn't have enough people to run this giant empire. So they imported people like the Polo family, Marco and his father and his uncle to do administrative duties for them, such as tax collecting. They also brought in a lot of Arabs, they brought in some French, they brought in anybody they can who they thought could help. And they established them in kind of a UN village where foreigners lived. So they would take up semi permanent residence and particularly bring their skills to bear on the administration of the Mongol Empire. So that's what Marco was doing there. That's why he was there, and that's also why he was stuck there for 24 years, because he wanted to leave and Kublai Khan wouldn't let him because he wanted to keep them there as long as possible when he left. But when he finally got to Beijing, which took about six or seven years, he was just beginning his adventures and he had finally met Kublai Khan, got some sense of the grandeur of him. Kublai Khan selected him as his to be an intelligence agent and tax collector. And when he left, you can see a picture of me on what's now known as the Marco Polo Bridge. If you've ever been to Beijing, you might have walked across this. This bridge existed in Marco's day and he wrote about it, has these very distinctive statues of some sort of cat or lion or monster. I've done a lot of looking into it and there's no two people have the same answer. But this bridge was the high road, if you will, out of Beijing to greater China. And it's where his journey began in earnest. So here's a close up of one of those creatures, supernatural creatures, along the bridge. As Marco walked along, he was basically confronted with empty spaces and with Mongol encampments. As nomads, they really didn't have cities. In fact, they were famous for destroying cities. And they lived in gurs, which are perhaps somewhat related to teepees. A gur is around hut that's made out of felt with a wood over a wood frame. Felt is simply boiled wool. And they live there with their livestock. And this is a modern gurd camp. But it's. Except for the kind of modern looking yellow building to the right, it's pretty much how they looked, as we know from pictures, illustrations in Marco's day. And they had a cooking fire right in the middle. The smoke went up through the top and they lived there with their families. Even. Even now, if you go out to the hinterlands in Mongolia and you go up to a gur camp, they will take you in and they'll feed you. There's no charge. And then after a couple days, you're expected to go on your way and continue your travels. So Kublai Khan was engaged in this experiment in social engineering to try and change the Mongol habit of being a nomad, being nomadic to a more pastoral one, like the Chinese, of staying in one place and cultivating land and building cities. It really didn't work, but it was a very interesting experiment. Closer view of typical Mongol livestock, and it's a view that Marco could have seen. Not too much has changed, as this woman here is milking her goats and probably going to use that to make cheese again. This is a remote gurd camp that I visited, but it was just a kind of scene that was described by Marco in circa 1300. This was a scene that a friend of mine who came along took of a Mongol girl who was. It's funny, two seconds after the camera snapped, she started to scream. And the next picture, I should have had it, it was just her shrieking as if she'd seen a ghost. So I don't think she was too happy about the visitors. Anyway, here's a representation of Kublai Khan, first Yuan emperor, which is what he called his dynasty. Yuan meant origin dynasty. In other words, he wanted to somehow give a sense that history was starting over again with the Mongol conquest of China. So he meant origin or original dynasty of China. And this was. Now he had four wives as well as many, many concubines and uncountable children. But this was his most popular wife, named Chabi, who, according to some accounts, was more popular and better known than he was throughout China because of her good works. And while he was sort of trying to meditate on unresolvable problems of the empire, she was famous for her charity and for her sense of fashion. And you'll notice her very distinctive hat and kind of clothing. She was wearing these decorations. These are pearls that come down. And this was a very typical Mongol headdress. But she had made some of her own variations to that which were adopted widely around China, and was in some ways a more outgoing figure than her somewhat reclusive husband, Kublein. Now, here was the kind of thing that Marco was doing during his journey there, which was, you see, commercial transactions. This is a Western manuscript illumination of a scene from Marco Polo's book, where merchants are paying for these. Now, you'll notice they're using coins, but actually in China, they used an invention which was unheard of in Europe, paper money. Europe had had paper money for centuries. They had had a form of printing that was like block printing or stenciling. And this was, of course, way advanced over the West. Sometimes they used actual paper that they made from pulpit pulp. Sometimes they used silk, which was sort of the main industry of China. And anyway, when Marco got back to Venice many years later, he brought back paper money and said, look at this wonderful invention. And people said to him, what are you talking about? What do you do with this? It's not going to work. Everybody knows you need to use coins or gems for, you know, for commerce, and paper money won't work. But, you know, it worked well enough in China and eventually it worked in Europe. Here was a typical Mongol banknote of the time, incomprehensible to the West. But this was the medium of exchange in Marco's day. And as a merchant was, in a sense, what he was all about. He was also about gems, especially rubies and pearls. This was a picture I took. There was a lake in Hangzhou, which was then the capital of the Song dynasty in China, the largest city in the world at times, at that time, 10 times larger than Venice or London or Paris. In fact, it was over a million people. When Marco again got back to Europe years later and he said there was a city of over a million people, people just considered him a fabulous. The exaggerator Marco. Millions. How could there be a city of a million people? It's as if somebody told us there was a city of 100 million people somewhere, we would say, no, no, no, that's impossible. But as it turned out, centuries later, when Europeans finally got back to China, he was right. That's how big Hangzhou was. Anyway. This was an important part of their economy, which were cultured pearls that come out of West Lake. That's a lake you've seen many times in Chinese paintings. It's the classic Chinese landscape, sort of their version of the Grand Canyon. And many famous Chinese artists over the century have painted the lake and the mountains. And also it was here that Marco was deeply began to become affected by the Buddhas, the statues of the Buddhas, as well as the monasteries and the actual Buddhist monks who were around the city. He began his journey, and he began life as a very conventional Roman Christian and had nothing to do with Islam and had nothing to do with Buddhism and shunned it all. However, that didn't change with Islam, but it did change over time with Buddhism. And as you read through his account, you'll notice how his impressions of Buddhism change from calling it idolatry and dismissing it all as idols to becoming so fascinated with the Buddha and what it represented that he put the Buddha on the same plane, compared him to Thomas the Apostle. This was the doubting Thomas. And as two spiritual figures with whom he felt some sense of connection or had something to take away from, that was, of course, heresy by Vinicius standards. But that was by now, at this point in Marco's journey, so far in the past, that he had become practically a different person, having been on the road, if you will, for years. I think that the longer he was away from home and the more he saw and the more various examples of suffering or deprivation or the evanescence of life that he saw around him, the more Buddhism spoke to him and seemed to fit with his surroundings, and he became more comfortable with it. Now, what's interesting is when he got back to Venice in his early 40s and eventually did get married, he forgot all about that and just went back to the original form of Roman Christianity that he had known as a child. But he does, on his trip anyway, undergo this, I think, very important spiritual transformation. And it was partly because he was so moved by scenes like this, not only in Hangzhou, but wherever he went. Here I am. This is just by West Lake. Marco Polo has now been adopted by China as an important national figure. And they've begun putting up these huge statues of him around China, which is very unusual because they're not very interested in honoring or exalting Westerners. That sort of runs antithetical to many aspects of inward looking Chinese culture, except for Marco Polo, because they feel that he wrote very favorably about China, was a good ambassador, if you will, about China. Now the irony here, of course, is that he really didn't understand China very much, didn't know Chinese, and really wrote favorably about the Mongols who had conquered China. So he wrote about the occupying force of China rather than the Chinese, who were really mysterious to him and kind of unfathomable and remained a closed, kind of a closed society to him, unlike the Mongols, who were very open, very porous, took him in and he identified with him and sort of felt like he, over time, like he had become one of them. Now, some Mongols were Buddhists, but basically they're what we call animists. But that such animism is such an empty term, it doesn't really mean much. They had their own religion, was a worship of heaven. And so the English word for that would be tengrism, which meant a spirit in the sky was what they worshipped. And they felt you came from the sky and after you died you went back to the sky. But there were also many, many, many local deities. And it got really complicated. And they were very imbued with a sense of the supernatural, even to the point that they did believe in various forms of life after death. And at one point, Marco was astounded to note that there's a lot of infant mortality in those days that they actually married dead children. Two families would get together, they each had a child who had died young, and they would marry these two children in some symbolic way, as if they continued to have a spiritual life that was significant. So anyway, the afterlife was very much present in daily life among the Mongols. And here's an example of the armor that they wore. You can see it was quite sophisticated. And you know, they were a warrior nation. Everybody, all men, not women, but all men were warriors. And that included the boys. So the entire country was, or populace, if you will, was military, militarized. I mentioned being able to fire backwards off a horse. Here's an illustration of that. Now, to Marco, this was very, very exciting and glamorous. And as you look at my book, you'll see that he wrote about them and their weapons and their military prowess with great enthusiasm. It was very exciting for him. And it seemed to me that they look to him in his mind's eye like that, and, you know, the Hell's Angels, when you think about it, they're nomadic. They don't really respect private property. They go everywhere they want to go on their Motorcycles, which is what modern Mongols now have adopted once they've moved away from the horse. And I think the Mongols had the same kind of. Kind of allure and glamour for Marco that the Hells Angels would have for an adolescent. And, you know, they just seemed exciting and reckless and lawless, and they lived by their own code, and that's how they looked to Europeans who were horrified by them. Now, by the time Marco got there, they had softened a lot. They were no longer the destructive Mongols of Genghis Khan, who had murdered everything in sight, including children, animals, plants, anything. When they. When they destroyed a city, that had changed a lot, especially thanks to his mentor, Kubla Khan. But nevertheless, that reputation still lingered. However, they did meet their match when they tried to invade Japan. This was a breach too far for them. This was Kublai Khan's last stand, when he was getting older and drinking a lot of kumas, this fermented mare's milk, which is sort of the Mongol national beverage. He mounted several failed invasions of the island of Japan, which he thought he would conquer as easily as he had conquered all of Asia. But as good as the Mongols were on land, they were that bad on water. And even though they had a giant navy, and they used a lot of skillful Chinese commanders as naval commanders as well as their own people, the invasions failed. They lost thousands of lives, and Japan remained as impregnable as ever. Although Marco himself never got to Japan, he wrote a lot about it from hearsay, from what he'd been able to learn. And the first mention that Europe ever heard of Japan, which was known as sapingu in his language, which was just a bad transcription or transliteration of Japan, came from Marco Polo. And. And it was assumed for a long time that he actually got there, but he never did. He just wrote about it vividly, which is not quite the same thing. Anyway, here's a somewhat fanciful depiction from a medieval Western manuscript of sailors drowning during a storm that came up during one of these invasions. The Mongols were not familiar with the effect of tides, and each time they mounted an invasion, it was during hurricane season, the kamikaze, the original kamikaze, which means divine wind. And each time these hurricanes came up, or kamikazes, and destroyed their fleet. So Japan felt that some sort of providence was protecting them and looking out for them. The result of his. All his chats in the jail with Rusticello, when they were freed in under two years and Marco went back to Venice after that, were manuscripts like this, heavily illustrated. Again, quite fanciful, that were in a multiplicity of languages and then circulated around. In those days, people didn't really own manuscripts. Nobility had them in their libraries, and churches had them in their libraries, and you could consult them in public places. But, you know, again, the person on the street didn't have manuscripts. Oh, and this is just sort of an overview of his route. Now, it's funny, you'll often see in books, manuscripts, online, wherever Marco Polo's route to China. But there's something I have to tell you that I found after a lot of research, nobody really knows, because it's a conjectural account. Marco didn't write a chronology as you look into his account. He wrote kind of a thematic description of his impressions of one place and then another and then another. It's more like a guidebook than a chronology. So it was not like, well, Tuesday we hit Beijing, and then we headed out for Hangzhou, and then we got there in two weeks. It's not like that. So we can only pick up from indirect hints what his actual route was. But you can see generally he started out along a northern branch of the Silk Road, working his way to Beijing, and then made some journeys into China, finally went south, writing about all these places, the way he went along the way, and then also writing about India, which was not completely unknown in Europe, and then eventually making his way back 24 years later and getting back to. To eventually getting back to Venice, where he was not recognized. He had been away for so long, and he and his father and uncle were wearing Mongol clothing in which they had sewed in their gems. And it took them a long time to establish their bona fides and figure out and persuade people that they were who they were. They found other relatives living in their house back in Venice very disconcerting. But eventually they proved who they were. But there was one little incident where I can't remember if it was his father or his uncle in his Mongol caftan, had, according to traditional traveler practice, sewed gems in it. And of course, this was. He risked his life for 24 years to collect this fortune in gems. And his wife was so horrified by this dirty, filthy garment that she gave it away to a beggar, obviously. And he was horrified. The next. Next day, he said, where's my caftan? And she told him what she had done. And so he went out around the city and eventually tracked this beggar down and was able to get his garment and therefore all his wealth back. And as I mentioned, Marco was not believed when he got back. It was believed. It Was thought that he was a teller of tall tales until he wrote down his account. But even then he was still not believe because there were so many other bogus accounts floating around all the way until the 19th century, when archaeologists and anthropologists began to get into China and they discovered, lo and behold, this is pretty much as Marco wrote it. In many ways, not that much had changed. And all these exotic customs they thought that Marco had made up, like the marriage of dead children, or the Mongols drinking kumis, or the city of Cambulac, the capital on what is now Beijing, which it seemed to be just sort of wonderful products of Marco's imagination, weren't. They were actually real. And so in this case, truth really did turn out to be stranger than fiction. On his deathbed in 1324, that's what he said. So as much as there was in his his book, we can only imagine the adventures and exploits and people that he left out. So if you have any questions, I talk way too long. I'm sorry about that, but yes. So they got all these jewels, trading for what? Or was that just their payment for services rendered? Both, both. It was currency they could use everywhere, and they also tried to collect as many as they possibly could, especially rubies. What did they trade for? Was it just silk? Spices? Different merchants had different specialties, but those were the ones that you think you'd run out after six years, run out of spices to trade away. Oh, sometimes they were buying and sometimes they were selling. And Kublai Khan was paying them also a lot. We don't really know how much, but he was their employer, in effect, so he paid for their travels. And so they were trading on the side as they went and trying to do as many of those transactions as they could. Of course, they could get these things very, very cheaply for next to nothing in Asia. When they got back to Venice, whatever they managed to bring back with them was worth, you know, a tremendous amount more. So you didn't have to bring much back to be quite wealthy if you could survive the journey. Yeah. I remember from childhood that Marco Polo supposedly brought noodles and spaghetti. Yeah. No, no, it's funny, he had nothing to do with that. Noodles probably developed in what we would call Asia Minor and spread along the Silk Road in both directions. They already had macaroni and noodles back in Venice. Where. When he left. So it had nothing to do with that. He did bring back things like paper money and coal and scientific instruments and gunpowder, none of which made the slightest impact on Venetians. When they saw it, they didn't know what to make of the gunpowder, they didn't know what to make of the coal because they were using peat and wood fire for as fuel at that point. The paper money they thought was impractical and they didn't understand the scientific instruments. These were the result of Arab astronomers and mathematicians who had developed these instruments. And Marco brought some of them back and they were the most advanced in the world at the time. And Kublai Khan acted as their patron and had them set up an observatory for him that was famous throughout Asia. But it was, in a sense, it had to be rediscovered in the west before it actually entered into the Western intellectual tradition. So Marco really, these inventions were not really understood. Just to make a very rough analogy, imagine if it was 1950 or 1960, and I came back from, you know, the year 2000 and I had a BlackBerry with me and I said, oh, look at this cool BlackBerry that I've got with me. And people would say, well, what is that? And I'd say, well, you know, it's a phone and you can do email and the Internet. They said, what do you mean, email? What do you mean, Internet? And the concepts behind the things that he brought back with him just didn't exist in Venice, which was one of the most advanced parts of Europe, let alone anywhere else. So it took a long time for the west to catch up with Asia and Marco Polo because they were so far ahead in many ways. Yes. His question sounds sort of a childhood legend. I have to ask, what is the origin of the children's game Marco Polo? Why is it called Marco Polo? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't think it has much to do any with Marco Polo himself. Yeah. Yes.

So Marco Polo seems like larger than life. He seems like this legendary figure, but the person of Marco Polo himself, what do you think the personal characteristics that he had made him be able to cross these boulders?

Well, you know, keep in mind he wasn't the only one. He wasn't the first one to discuss discovered places. He was doing what merchants did at that time, which was to make this long and hazardous journey. But I think we can infer from the way he writes and the example of his life that he was very resourceful and hardy and persistent, that he was capable of fitting into different contexts and cultures. He often seems to be very eloquent and very charming and very funny. You don't get this in some of the later translations of Marco Polo because they've just kind of been there's sort of translations of translations of translations and they've been sanitized, but in the earlier ones which are closer to his original language. You know, he has a really kind of a Rabelaisian sense of humor in some of the stories you tell, these sort of bawdy stories and other stories. So he sounds like somebody who knew that he lived an extraordinary life. He claimed he traveled more than anybody else. That's not exactly true and I'll tell you why in a second. But Newey lived an extraordinary life and just had a burning ambition to write it down before it was late. He was also a person of extraordinary vanity and he wanted to be celebrated by poetry as this great traveler. And this was his bid to do it was to write that book. Now he claimed he had traveled more than anybody else, but there were actually two people known to him who had traveled more and that was his father and uncle because they had made two trips to China, not just one. They had gone before him on a 16 year long trip to see Kublai Khan. And in fact he only let them go because. Because they promised to bring back 100 so called wise men from Europe. What he meant was kind of a brain trust to help him with the administration of his empire. Well, that was a bluff. They didn't know hundred wise men. Instead they brought back Marco on the second trip which they all survived. So, you know, if somebody could have written their life stories of Niccolo and Maffeo, the five father and uncle of Marco, they might have even been more extraordinary. You know, we just don't know. It's just that we happen to have Marco's happen to be written down and so we have it to pour over. Yes. Are there any documented proof like letters you wrote back home or. I don't know. No people, no, we just don't from that era. We really don't find those kinds of documents. We don't have letters, correspondence. We have some official correspondence among the clergy because it's been preserved in official libraries, but that kind of correspondence, not really. However, Marco was not the only, this is not the only person who ever went on the Silk Road and wrote about his adventures. He was preceded by a number of clergy from the west and from the east who wrote about their experiences. Western clergy were going to try and convert modern Mongols to Christianity. Good luck. It was very difficult. They got almost nowhere. And then there was what I call the Eastern Marco Polo, who was a Nestorian Christian. This was a kind of a lost Christian branch who was ethnically Chinese, who was a monk named Raban Salma. At the same time, Marco Polo was going on the Silk Road, east to west, he was going west to east, and he also wrote about his adventures. He eventually wound up in Paris and even made it to Rome because his goal was to see the Pope, to see if he can effect a reconciliation between these two branches of the Church. And he was just an extraordinary figure because he just went with one companion or two and also wrote an account of his adventures. But it's so interesting because when he gets to Paris, you know, he sees it through the eyes of a Nestorian Christian from a remote province in Manchuria, and he doesn't see what we'd see and doesn't notice the kinds of things that would seem so obvious to us. So it's an entirely different sensibility. There are also Chinese travelers who wrote about their personal. And so one can compare and contrast. Probably the most important contrast to make with Marco Polo is Ibn Battuta, who is called in shorthand the Muslim Marco Polo and is one of the most celebrated writers, historians in Islam. And about 30 or 40 years after, Marco undertook what was known as a rila, where he was the son of a wealthy merchant family and went on a lot of travels, covered many of the same places in exact same cities that Marco went only a generation later. And some places were in better shape and some places were in worse shape than when Marco had passed through. So you can, you know, if you did an overlay, you could compare and contrast what these two people had seen and tracked pretty precisely what was going on in very remote parts of the world. And I'll get you in a second. And just like Marco also dictated his account to an amanuensis when he got home. And just like Marco was often accused of fabrications and exaggerations. Anyway, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, not at all. Are there any accounts of Marco Polo being romantically involved? You know, we don't know that's in those. In those days, people didn't really write about personal feelings and experiences in a way that we take so much for granted. Now, that was really a phenomenon of the 19th century. It seems second nature to us now. But it was alien then, so that's a fancy way of saying no. But he did write with great enthusiasm and gusto about the marital customs and courtship. That's the euphemism, courtship customs of the various tribes and peoples that he went through, and very explicitly as well, so you can gather, because he'll sometimes perhaps refer to himself Obliquely, as a young traveler who might get involved in a certain situation, but he wouldn't tell a story in the first person the way we would now, for example, he passed through towns which eventually became notorious in Europe, where travelers were welcomed into the homes and the beds of married women. And when they were there, their husbands would leave for a few days, and the travelers would then share the beds of the women and then move on. And then they were very proud, the husbands were very proud to have had this special guest in their house and gave their wives special jewelry as a result. And again, this is the kind of thing that people in Europe thought that Marco was, you know, what was he smoking? But in fact, that's the kind of thing that actually did occur. And you might say, why? And the short answer, I think, was to replace the gene pool. Because these were very, very remote towns, and, you know, if you kept burying your first copy cousins, you'd wind up with very, very serious genetic defects and birth defects. So this was an adaptation to replenish a gene pool which had become depleted over the centuries in these very isolated areas. So that's kind of the closest we get. But, you know, it's just people didn't write about feelings in the same way that we. We think of them now at that time. So one has to work a little bit to kind of infer what subjective states Marco might have been going through. He'd much rather tell you about somebody else than about himself. So that's the best answer I can give you about. One can surmise he'd had a number of romantic or some sort of episodes, you know, because of the way he writes about them with great familiarity. But all we know for sure is that when he got back to Venice and after he wrote this epic, he did finally get married in his early 40s, had three daughters, and lived to the ripe old age of 70 as a very wealthy and very grumpy merchant who kept suing everybody for just, you know, very small amounts of money. Just. Just. And kind of a curmudgeon. Not at all. The Marco of his youth. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about your process in writing the biography? Did you do the research? Was it pretty much all for the luminary, or did you kind of work on it along the way? You know, this is my eighth book, and I did this one. I've done ones for other reasons, but I did this one because I kind of thought it was impossible. First of all, it took place in the 13th century. The language problem was very, very Daunting, because the sources are in French, Chinese, Mongolian, all these. I only know French, which is actually very helpful for this, but a lot of different languages. There aren't any other books in English, with one exception for adults, about Marco Polo. A lot of children's books and a lot of scholarly articles. But until the 19th century, when people actually, scholars actually went to China, those scholarly articles aren't worth much. And so despite his name being so well known at the beginning of this project, I thought, well, I'd find a roomful or a shelf full of books, and there really wasn't. Now, there is a bit more in other languages, but they tend to be more about, you know, it's like life and times, but it's 90% times. So there wasn't really a template for me to follow. So I just actually started with the book, which I tried to take Rusticello's interpolations aside at face value, and then was lucky to find some experts who were very helpful with me on my travels through China, Mongolia and in Venice. And because I'm a writer, I mean, I'm a creature of libraries. So I went to as many archives and libraries as I could to find some sort of corroborative sources that would place Marco Polo in certain events. Now, one of the unnerving things about him is we don't really have Marco Polo showing up in other people's accounts, with one partial but very important exception. Towards the end of his life, he and his father and his uncle escorted a Mongol princess to Persia, which was sort of their ticket home, because the idea was they could then go home once they had done this last service for Kublai Khan. And there's no way anybody in Europe could have ever known about this rather obscure diplomatic mission they undertook at the. The behest of Kublai Khan. But in Chinese Annals, they talk about the exact same mission, and they talk about the three Europeans, Marco, father and uncle, but they don't name them. Who escorted this princess? Chinese annals were a very, very detailed record of all the doings in China that kept over the centuries, and it fit exactly and precisely with Marco's description of. And there are other points where he's describing things, and the only way he could have written about them was if he had been there. There's no other source that he could have consulted and nobody he could have asked, no way he could have heard this secondhand, even out on the Silk Road, unless he had been there. But he is a somewhat ghostly kind of figure, and partly because it Is it is so long ago. So this was, I thought, in some ways a very challenging book to do. You know, if I've done, say this is the opposite of when I wrote about James Agee some years ago, the writer. And you have letters and you have all his relatives and you have his, you know, widow and widows and girlfriends and friends and colleagues. And you can go talk to, you know, everybody and hear impressions of somebody who you can know exactly what was going on. And this is quite a different story. But nevertheless, I think there's enough. He left enough traces for us to get some sense of what he was like and what the times were like. Yes. How much of Marco's route did you travel? We saw some of your travel photographs. Oh, I went. Let me see if I can back this up. Try this. I went across. Well, I was in Venice and I went across China and then back the other way and then also up to Mongolia here. But I did not go to India and I did not go through Afghanistan. It was getting a little unstable there as my research on the book was proceeding. And there were a lot of other places that I could have gone that I didn't go, but that would have meant like a two or three volume kind of book. So I covered as much of his route as seemed might be practical for purposes of a manageable volume. You travel on horseback or camel just a little bit, just to get a sense of it. In Mongolia now, you mainly travel because the distance is Mongolia is as big as Western Europe. That's just Mongolia. Forget about China. There is a road, but you don't travel on the road because the road's in such bad condition. You travel on the gully next to the road, like the shoulder, the soft shoulder. And it's all four wheel drives. And you usually go with a driver who's also a really good mechanic because these cars, they're like four wheel drive Toyotas usually. They tend to break down because they're such hard use and then they can fix it and then they. You keep going. And there are gas stations widely spaced, but out there often you bring a jerry can of gas with you and you kind of go from Gurkamp to Gurkamp. So it's just a different, you know, it's a different way of living. There's one big city in Mongolia now which didn't exist in Marco's day, called Ulaanbaatar, which is sort of a relic of the Soviet occupation. Occupation which went on until 1989. Yeah. Where is Marco Polo buried? Oh, he's buried in a church in Venice. I actually write about that. We're not exactly sure where because there was reconstruction to the church. So his actual tomb or crypt has been lost. Because they would sort of add layers on. Venice is so crowded. They'd add layers, one building or, you know, layer of tombs on top of another. So there is a statue of where he's believed to be buried, but we don't know the actual spot anymore. Pardon? Oh, you know, it's in the book. I just don't remember it off the top of my head. But it is in the book. Toward the end, I guess. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thanks a lot.