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Marco Polo's journey across the Mongol Eurasia

1271–1295 CE·Exploration & colonisation·Eurasia (Venice to Yuan China)·
1271–1295 CEDate
Exploration & colonisationCategory
25Empires active
Date
1271–1295 CE
Category
Exploration & colonisation
Region
Eurasia (Venice to Yuan China)
Era
Post-Classical / Medieval
Significance

Around 1271 the young Venetian merchant Marco Polo set out with his father and uncle along the Silk Road, reaching the court of Kublai Khan in China by the mid-1270s.

He claimed to have spent some seventeen years in service to the Great Khan before returning to Venice by sea and land in 1295 after roughly twenty-four years abroad. Captured in a war with Genoa, he dictated an account of his travels to the writer Rustichello of Pisa, producing 'The Travels of Marco Polo' (Il Milione), which described the wealth, cities, paper money, postal relays and customs of Yuan China and other Asian lands. Whether or not every detail is reliable, the book became the most influential European account of Asia in the Middle Ages, circulating widely in manuscript and shaping Western geographic imagination. It exemplifies the long-distance travel and cross-cultural contact made possible by the Pax Mongolica, and it later helped inspire Europe's age of exploration.

See the world map in 1271–1295 CE →More exploration & colonisationThe Post-Classical / Medieval era

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Further reading

The wider story

The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China

Dieter Kuhn

Accessible survey of Song China (Harvard History of Imperial China).

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