Marco Polo - The Travels
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Marco Polos voyages began in 1271 with a visit to China. Afterward, he served Kublai Khan on numerous diplomatic missions in the Far East. His subsequent account of his travels offers a fascinating glimpse of what he encountered abroad: unfamiliar religions; new customs and societies; the spices and silks of the East; the precious gems, exotic vegetation, and wild beasts of faraway lands. Evoking a remote and long-vanished world with color and immediacy, Marco Polos book revolutionized Western ideas about the then-unknown East and remains one of the greatest travel accounts of all time. Nigel Cliffs new translation, based on the original medieval sources, is a fresh, authoritative rendering, with a lively introduction and notes.
Illustration by Coralie Bickford-Smith
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PENGUIN 
CLASSICS
MARCO POLO was born in 1254, the son of Niccol Polo, a Venetian merchant. A few years later his father and uncle set out across the Black Sea on a business venture, only to find themselves caught up in a Mongol civil war and unable to return home. Eventually they joined an envoy headed to the Mongol ruler Khubilai Khan, who quizzed them and sent them as his emissaries to the pope. In 1269 they reached Venice and Niccol was reunited with his fifteen-year-old son Marco, who joined them when they set out again for the East in 1271. The journey would last for twenty-four years. Marco quickly learned the Mongol Empires languages and customs and by his own testimony became a favoured agent of Khubilai Khan, who sent him from his court at Beijing on long missions and enjoyed the detailed reports he made on his return. The purpose and exact route of these travels is still a matter of debate, but Marco almost certainly made at least one journey south-west as far as Burma, another south to modern-day Quanzhou, in China, and a third by sea to south and south-east Asia. In 1291 the Polos accompanied a Mongol diplomatic mission that sailed on a fleet of junks via Sumatra and India to the Persian Gulf. From there they made their way back to Venice, arriving in 1295. Shortly afterwards Marco was captured during a naval battle and imprisoned in Genoa, where he met a romance writer named Rustichello of Pisa. The Travels, the book they wrote together, is an eclectic mix of businesslike gazetteer, wide-eyed cultural reportage and colourful legends. Though widely disbelieved from the very beginning, its unprecedented scope and detail made it among the most influential of medieval books, and it continues to excite lively debate today. Marco Polo died in 1324 and was survived by his wife and three daughters.
NIGEL CLIFF is the author of The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), which was a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing; The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco da Gama (2011), which was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize; and Moscow Nights (2016). He has written widely for The Times, The Economist and The New York Times and has lectured at Oxford University, the British Library and the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He lives in London with his wife, the ballerina Viviana Durante, and their son, Orlando.
Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by
NIGEL CLIFF
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
These translations first published in Penguin Classics 2015
This edition published in Penguin Classics 2016
Editorial material and translation copyright Nigel Cliff, 2015
Cover Illustration: Detail from a 19th-century copy of an original 15th century map, showing the travels of Marco Polo through the Orient The Granger Collection / TopFoto
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-19878-1
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1254 Marco Polo is born in Venice to merchant Niccol Polo and his first wife
1256 Hleg, a grandson of Genghis (or Chinggis) Khan, founds the Mongol state known as the Ilkhanate in Persia
1257 Berke, another of Genghis Khans grandsons, becomes khan of the Golden Horde or Western Mongols; a devout Muslim, he establishes Islam in a Mongol state for the first time
1258 Mongol forces under Hleg sack Baghdad and execute the last caliph
1259 Death of Meng, the fourth Great Khan of the Mongol Empire
1259 Hlegs troops and their Crusader allies invade Muslim Syria
1260 Niccol Polo and his brother Maffeo sail from Constantinople to the Crimean port of Sudak with a consignment of jewels; from Sudak they head to the court of Berke Khan at Sarai
1260 Battle of Ayn Jalut in Galilee; the Mongols suffer their first enduring defeat at the hands of the Mamluks of Egypt
1260 Khubilai is elected Great Khan; for four years he is embroiled in a war of succession with his brother Ariq Bke
1261 The Byzantines retake Constantinople, which Frankish Crusaders had sacked and seized in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade
1262 Berke declares war on his cousin Hleg in retribution for his destruction of Baghdad, trapping Niccol and Maffeo; they take refuge in Bukhara, staying there for three years
1264 Khubilai begins construction of a new city, called Khanbaliq or Daidu, near the ruins of the old North Chinese capital; the city is now Beijing
1265 Abagha succeeds his father Hleg as ruler of the Ilkhanate
1266 Niccol and Maffeo are invited to accompany an envoy en route to Khubilais court; they leave Bukhara and travel east for a year
1266 Baraq becomes khan of the Chagatai Khanate of Central Asia and fights its de facto ruler Qaidu, Khubilais nephew and rival; after a truce the territory is divided between the two
1266 Meng-Temr succeeds Berke as khan of the Golden Horde
1267 After receiving Niccol and Maffeo at court, Khubilai dispatches them as his emissaries to the pope
1268 The Principality of Antioch, one of the last Crusader states, falls to the Egyptian sultan Baibars
1268 Death of Pope Clement IV; a three-year-long papal election begins
1269 Niccol and Maffeo reach Acre; on learning there is no pope they go on to Venice, where Niccol discovers that his wife is dead and is reunited with his son Marco, now aged fifteen
1270 Baraq attacks the Ilkhanate and is defeated by Abagha; he dies soon afterwards
1271 Niccol, Maffeo and Marco set out for Khubilais court; shortly after leaving Acre they are briefly recalled by the newly elected Pope Gregory X
1271 Khubilai establishes the Yuan Dynasty and is proclaimed Emperor of China
1272 Khubilai officially names Daidu (Beijing) as his imperial capital
1273 By imperial decree banknotes become legal tender in Khubilais empire
1273 The city of Xiangyang falls to Khubilais troops after a five-year siege; the Polos are later claimed to have been instrumental in its capture
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