A medieval travelogue that serves as biography brought me to British historian John Man‘s retracing of Italian Marco Polo‘s journey to China in service of Mongolian general and statesman Kublai Khan from 1271 to 1295. First published in November 2014, Marco Polo: The Journey that Changed the World serves partly as a modern day correction to the Rustichello da Pisa and Marco Polo co-written 13th century autobiography The Travels of Marco Polo.
The Rustichello da Pisa work, which in its original form has been lost to history, has been reworked from multiple languages. That book is thought to be true in broad strokes rather than a firsthand telling of legitimate testimony and experience. The John Man book that is our focus here made efforts to visit historical places in the reconstructed original accounts to make judgments of truths in the original accounts informed by Man‘s sense of what is likely, possible and improbable from the reassembled original. With commentaries on original cultures and religions a part of The Travels of Marco Polo, Man comments on the fact of the commentary as well as the objectives in the original writing.
Man‘s book is maybe half about the journey that Marco Polo took as a European visiting Far East Asia, with the other half, as Jason Pettus observes, serving as “a detailed archeological and anthropological guide to emperor Kublai Khan, his summer imperial city Xanadu, and other such details about ancient China that don’t really have much to do with Polo or his journey at all.” Xanadu, in the usage of Pettus and Man, is thought to be Shangdu, Mongolia, China. The book title focuses more on the first half of the story rather than the full scope of the book as part of a marketing decision related to a television series that had been released ahead of the John Man book.
The overall work as presented here today offered insight into a pair of related subjects that were interesting to me. I hadn’t realized ahead of the reading that the focus of the second half of the book would get into subjects that offered historical knowledge in a direction slightly afar from what I would have known to expect. This said, I grant Marco Polo: The Journey that Changed the World by John Man 3.75-stars on a scale of 1-to-5.
Matt – Wednesday, April 3, 2024
Matt Lynn Digital 