[Music] Hi everyone, welcome back to another video on my channel today I will tell you about a person who returned from a trip telling such an absurd story that everyone thought he was lying or exaggerating, but it was all true. The things that Marco Polo said he saw on his travels through Asia were beyond the imagination of anyone from his time. But today, you know that it was all true. Although he was not the first to travel eastward, Marco Polo was responsible for showing his contemporaries the richness of Asian cultures. In today's video, I will talk about Marco Polo and his fantastic travels. But before that, the little reminder that you already know by heart. Check if your notification bell is activated. If it's not, activate it. Take a look to see if you are still subscribed to the channel. To help the channel, please watch this video, it's already a good help. Share this and other videos from the channel, comment here, give your like or dislike. And to help financially, you can join the channel's club. The link is below this video, or you can send a payment through Pix. Alright, let's get to today's video. The exact date of Marco Polo's birth is not known, but it can be calculated because it is known that he was 15 years old in 1269. So, the year of his birth would probably be 1254 or a little earlier. He was born in Venice into a

In distant lands, there are records that a great-uncle of Marco Polo, also named Marco Polo, made a fortune with a ship loaded with goods brought from Constantinople. In the episode about the fall of Constantinople that I talked about earlier, I discussed a bit about the trade routes between that city and Venice. Marco Polo's father was named Nicolo and had an import business with his brother Matteo. They amassed a fortune by trading with the East, especially with the Latin Empire, which was established in 1204 after the Fourth Crusade when Constantinople was taken from the Byzantines. Yes, indeed, the Crusaders decided to attack another Christian empire instead of attempting to reconquer Jerusalem, which had been taken by the Muslims in 1187. I narrated this story of the capture of Jerusalem in the episode about Saladin. The Polo brothers brought to Europe everything valuable that came from the East: spices, silks, gemstones, and musk, which was used to make perfume. Business was so good that Nicolo had a palace in Venice near the Grand Canal. They also maintained an office in Constantinople, which during the Latin Empire was dominated by the Venetians. Traveling at that time was not like it is today, where you can take a plane to Tokyo on Monday and be back by the weekend. It was very difficult, complicated, and also dangerous. People would make a will before embarking on a business trip. No one

In another country, if there wasn't the prospect of spending months or years in that other place, and that's what happened to Nicolo and Mateu, who left Venice to live in Constantinople without a set return date. Their family was left behind, including Nicolo's pregnant wife. Their son, Marco, was born months after his father's departure. The two brothers settled in the Venetian district of Constantinople and had several advantages for being from Venice, such as lower taxes and diplomatic immunity. However, like savvy businessmen, they kept an eye on the political situation. In 1260, they felt things were not going well in the city. They sold everything they had there, exchanged the money for precious stones that could be easily carried and sold when needed. However, they decided not to return to Venice but to use the money to venture into a new route through a little-explored territory in Asia. They first decided to settle in the city of Sudak in Crimea on the shores of the Black Sea. This city was a well-known destination for Venetians because it was the end of the Silk Road, a major trade route where products from India and China arrived. At that time, the region had been conquered by the so-called Golden Horde, a large Mongol Empire that extended to Siberia and present-day Kazakhstan, reaching Eastern Europe. Far from being terrified of the Mongols, who were considered barbarians by Westerners, the brothers...

The Polos saw this as a little explored trading opportunity. In 1261, they found their intuition was absolutely correct when the Byzantines reconquered Constantinople and began to persecute the Venetians. However, if the Polos had managed to escape in time with their lives and fortune, another problem arose. The trade route between the Black Sea and Venice had to pass through the Bosphorus Strait, which was controlled by Constantinople. As Venetians, they didn't feel safe making this journey. Therefore, the two brothers couldn't return home, let alone do business. So, what did they do? Nicolo and Matteo decided to head east in the opposite direction. Although it wasn't unprecedented, it was very rare for Europeans to travel to Asia beyond the Black Sea. The two visited the leader of the Golden Horde and in 1266, they reached the court of a grandson of Genghis Khan, the Mongol leader Kublai Khan of the Yuan dynasty, who at the time ruled over a vast territory centered in northern China. Kublai was fascinated by what they told him about Europe and decided to send them back with gifts for the Pope and orders to bring 100 missionaries who could educate his courtiers about Christianity and Western customs. Meanwhile, in Venice, Marco Polo, without a father and mother as she died when he was a child, an aunt and uncle of Marco Polo took him.

He was raised to become a merchant like his father, learning finances, asset evaluation, and everything needed to deal with merchant ships. Besides that, almost nothing is known about his childhood. In 1269, finally, Nicolo and Matteo Polo managed to return to Venice after a 15-year absence. This was the first time Marco Polo met his father in person. The two brothers found out that they couldn't fulfill the mission they had received from Kublai Khan because the Pope had died a year earlier, and a new one had not been elected yet. Nevertheless, they made preparations for the return journey and decided to take Marco Polo with them. The merchants took the ship from Venice to Acre, the capital of what remained of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. From there, they traveled on camelback to Ormuz in present-day Iran. There, they received news that a new Pope, Gregory X, had been elected, who happened to be the papal representative in Acre. The three hurried back to the city and managed to deliver Kublai's letter to Gregory before he left for Rome. The new Pope sent gifts and an invitation for the Khan to send representatives to the papal court, but he only managed to send two Friars instead of the 100 requested by Kublai Khan. In the end, neither of the two Friars could endure the hardships of the journey and turned back. The Polos continued following probably the northern branch of the Silk

Central Asia leaving Crimea passing through the northern Caspian Sea and crossing present-day Afghanistan and the Gobi Desert until reaching China. The journey was difficult and full of dangers; at one point, they were attacked by bandits who approached during a sandstorm. Later, Marco Polo fell ill and had to wait in the mountains until he could recover. In the desert, they had a very difficult crossing and needed to ration food because for at least a month, there was nothing they could hunt or gather. Despite the hardships, young Marco Polo was enchanted by the East and all those landscapes, smells, and customs that were unlike anything he had encountered before. They only reached the court of Kublai in 1274 when Marco was 21 years old. He was amazed by the immense marble palace where Kublai lived in Shangdu or Xanadu, a fortified city located in the present-day Inner Mongolia region of China. Kublai Khan was delighted to welcome back his Venetian friends and greatly appreciated Marco Polo, whom he found very intelligent yet modest and kind. The Polos' idea was to stay for a few years and then return with more goods to resell in Europe, but Kublai Khan was not interested in that. To keep them there, he decided to make them an offer they could not refuse: he gave important positions at court to Nicolo and Matteo and turned young Marco into one of his diplomatic envoys. This way, they

Three poles gained unprecedented access to all corners not only of the empire of Yuan but also of neighboring countries that had never seen a European before, such as present-day Myanmar. They were well received everywhere because they carried an emblem that they were official representatives of Kublai Khan. The emblem was a 30 cm long gold plate with an inscription that guaranteed the bearer tax exemption in the empire's territory, as well as the right to lodging, food, and horses at the road stations. These stations were part of the extensive communication network of the empire. Marco Polo documented this complex structure that allowed Kublai Khan to transmit and receive information in an immense territory with great efficiency. Marco Polo was very observant and deeply interested in learning about these new cultures. He recorded several things that were still unknown in Europe, such as paper money, and learned to speak various languages of the empire. Many times he learned the name of an animal or a typical object of Asia in the local language, as it did not exist in Marco Polo's native language. He had to use his imagination to describe it, as in the case of the rhinoceros, which I will talk about later on. Over time, Kublai Khan placed increasing trust in Marco Polo, who later claimed to have held several important and profitable positions in the government. He supposedly had been a city governor, a tax collector in another, and finally received

A seat on the Emperor's Private Council, but the Polos never abandoned the idea of returning to Venice. Finally, in 1291, they managed to convince Kublai Khan to allow their departure. The family had stayed in Yuan for 17 years. The Emperor then gave them one last mission: to escort Princess Cocoin to marry the monarch of another Mongol state, the Ilkhanate located in present-day Iran. The journey was by sea, departing from the port of Xanadu in southern China, stopping at the islands of Sumatra and Sancian, then sailing along the Indian coast to the Ilkhanate. The voyage was tumultuous, facing storms and all kinds of dangers. After two years, they finally reached Persia. Between the marriage proposal and their arrival at the Ilkhanate, so much time had passed that Cocoin's betrothed had died. She ended up marrying his son. According to Marco Polo, the princess came out ahead because the son of the man who proposed to her was not as handsome as his father but was fairer and more intelligent. From Persia, the Polos continued to the Black Sea, sailing back passing through Constantinople, which had already made peace with Venice, until finally reaching Venice in 1295. In total, they were away from home for 24 years. Marco Polo, who was a teenager when the journey began, returned home at the age of 40. Legend has

And they were surprised by the answer, the bosses, in addition to a collection of unbelievable stories, the Polos returned to Venice with a real fortune in jewels. At the time, Venice was at war with Genoa, and Marco decided to help in the battles. He armed a ship equipped with a catapult and set off for battle. This new adventure lasted less than a year because he ended up being captured by the Genoese in a battle off the coast of Anatolia. Marco Polo spent 3 years in prison, where he shared a cell with the writer Ruccello de Pisa. Ruccello was fascinated by the stories he heard from Marco Polo and decided to write them down. This is how the work that made him famous emerged, the book of Wonders and the Description of the World, better known as The Travels of Marco Polo. He was also called in Italian H Million, which was Marco Polo's nickname. But there are two versions about the origin of this nickname. One is that Marco Polo became very famous in his narratives because he used the word million for everything, which people found exaggerated. The other is that it was simply a family nickname to distinguish him from another Polo family living in Venice. This book was probably the biggest bestseller of the Middle Ages, before printed books existed. At that time, to have a copy, one had to wait for a professional called a scribe to make a manuscript page by page, which was an

They decided they needed to go through all of this to have a copy of Marco Polo's adventures so much so that translations into dozens of languages emerged during his lifetime. Today, there are about 150 copies left, which is a large number for a medieval manuscript. The language in which the book was written was the Franco-Italian dialect spoken in the Venice region at the time, but this version disappeared. What is known today is based on various translations into Old French, Italian, and Latin. They are all slightly different from each other because each scribe would add or remove something, change a word for another, or make a spelling mistake. So it is almost impossible to exactly recover the original text. It is believed that the initial idea of the work was to create a kind of manual for merchants who wanted to venture into business with the Mongols, but the book exceeded the original project, growing and turning into a travel narrative. Bru Cello, who was a novelist, probably embellished the story a bit to give it style, but it seems to follow Marco's Adventures narrated by Marco quite accurately. The book The Travels of Marco Polo is divided into four books. The first begins with a preface describing the journey of Nicolo and Matteo Polo, and the rest is dedicated to Marco's own journey through the Middle East and Central Asia. The second book talks about Kublai Khan's court and China, the third deals with coastal regions, describing the southeast.

Asian or Sri Lanka, India, and also Japan, and even the east coast of Africa. The last book focuses on the most recent news of the Mongol Empire at the time, such as wars and conquests. One of the most interesting things is that Polo does not place himself at the center of the narrative; he describes the cultures he encountered not as a fascinated tourist or as a colonizer who finds everything inferior just because it is different, but with a non-judgmental gaze, almost like an anthropologist - centuries before anthropology emerged as a science. Marco Polo showed no scandal, for example, when describing a region in Tibet where women never married as virgins, which was the opposite of what happened in Europe. He also praised things he found intelligent, like Kublai's decision to plant trees along the roads to provide shade for travelers, or the habit he observed in the Malabar region of India of washing before eating. Additionally, the book also provided Europeans with the first description that allowed them to know the geography of East Asia. Records of the regions between Turkey and Persia had existed since antiquity. The conqueror Alexander the Great went even further, reaching the Ganges River in India and the south of present-day Afghanistan, as I told in the episode about him here on the channel. However, what was at the far east of the continent was still unknown in Europe. With the descriptions of Marco Polo's journey, the geographical knowledge of

Europe expanded for the first time in the Middle Ages even though there was no map to illustrate it. The first cartographer to include some of the places visited by Marco Polo was the author of a Catalan Atlas from 1375 that listed the names of 30 Chinese cities and some other points in Asia. However, it was Fra Mauro who first recorded all the places mentioned in the book to create a more complete and accurate world map. By 1450, as if that wasn't enough, the narratives of events made the book a precious source for the history of Asian peoples due to the records of kings, wars, and battles that could be compared with other local sources. There were so many new and wonderful things that people struggled to believe that the whole story was true. But between us, it didn't help much that Marco Polo claimed, for example, to have seen fantastic animals like unicorns, salamanders, and even chickens with fur. In fact, this was the way he and Rustichello found to explain things that existed but had no European equivalent. The Unicorn, for instance, was described as a horrendous animal with a head as big as a wild boar's and a black horn, which in reality was a rhinoceros, an animal that exists in Asia and Africa and was unknown to Europeans at the time, who only had references to the mythical unicorn. The closest thing to a rhinoceros according to Marco Polo and Rustichello. As

mythical creature that lived in fire, as in European folklore, but rather a heat-resistant material: asbestos. The confusion probably occurred because he must have heard the term from the Persians, who believed that asbestos originated from the fur of another mythical animal they called samandar. From samandar to salamander was a quick leap. As for chickens with fur, the answer is even simpler. There is a Chinese breed of chickens with such fine feathers that they appear to have fur. Marco Polo's credibility was supported by the fact that he was able to accurately point out where the accounts of previous travelers ended up delving into the realm of fable or were inaccurate. His narrative is much more detailed and clearly states what he saw with his own eyes and what he only knew from third-party accounts. The credibility of the book gained a powerful ally in 1302 when the Dominican friar Francesco Pipino translated the work into Latin and attested that he believed the content to be true because he knew the author and considered him prudent, honorable, and loyal. Other Dominicans also began to defend the narrative, which was crucial at the time because the main task of this order was evangelization. If they believed that Marco Polo was telling the truth, they could use this information as a basis for missions aimed at spreading Christianity in East Asia, which indeed happened. There was a belief that such a respected order would not be based on

In something that was not real, what helped people to trust more in Marco Polo's narrative, although there are clearly exaggerations in the story and also errors and confusions. Historians and archaeologists more recently were able to identify many details that were thought to be wrong or inaccurate, from city names to weight measurements. As for Marco Polo, he was released from Genoese prison in 1299 and had plenty of time to witness the success of his book. During his absence, his father and uncle had invested the wealth brought from Asia in other businesses and bought an even larger palace in the Canario district in the north of Venice. Nicolo Polo had died shortly after, and Marco Polo became a partner with his uncle Matteo. They financed several other expeditions to Asia but never returned there and probably never left Venice again. In 1300, Marco Polo married Donata Boder, the daughter of another merchant, and they had three daughters. He also had another daughter before that, but it is unknown if he had been married before or if the girl was born out of wedlock. Besides continuing to trade and increasing the family's wealth, Marco frequently received visitors who wanted to talk about what he had seen during his travels. Many things that he did not narrate to Rustichello de Pisa appeared in other people's books, such as a comet he saw in China but was not visible in.

In 1323, in Europe, Marco Polo fell ill and ended up bedridden for months. In 1324, he sent for a priest to witness his will. He appointed his wife and daughters as heirs, instead of indicating a male relative, as was more common at the time. This probably had to do with the fact that women in Venice were involved in business since men often spent a lot of time away on business trips, just like Marco Polo's father and uncle had done before. In his will, Marco specified that a Tartar servant, who probably came with him from Asia, should be freed and given a sum of money. He also made a donation to the Church of San Lorenzo, where he wanted to be buried. He divided a part of his assets and properties among some other individuals, religious institutions, and the guilds and fraternities he was a part of. Like his birth, the exact date of Marco Polo's death is also uncertain. Records indicate that it happened shortly after the will was made, probably between January and June of 1324, when he was around 70 years old. Among the assets listed in his will was the paiza, the golden tablet that Kublai Khan had given him, but his legacy was much more enduring. Christopher Columbus, for instance, was a big fan of Marco Polo's travels. Among his belongings, an annotated printed edition of Marco Polo's work was found, showing the impact of the book.

Helped Columbus to have the idea that the Far East could be reached by traveling West through the Atlantic. What he did not expect is that there were lands in the middle of the way, and it wasn't just a few lands; it was an entire continent, right, the American continent where Columbus arrived in 1492. So, what do you think of these fantastic journeys of Marco Polo? I find it very interesting. There was a very old miniseries, and when I was a kid, I remember watching this miniseries. There is a series on Netflix called Marco Polo. And you, when faced with the craziest journey that no one believed, what did you see that was very strange, and when you tried to report it, no one really understood what you were talking about? Share below in the comments. Cheers, until the next video.

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