Marco Polo
Marco Polo
Marco Polo (1254–1324) was a Venetian merchant and traveler whose account of his journeys through Asia gave medieval Europe one of its most detailed pictures of China and the East. In 1271, at about seventeen, he set out with his father, Niccolò, and his uncle Maffeo, traveling overland along the Silk Road to the court of Kublai Khan, founder of the Yuan dynasty. He spent some seventeen years in China, where the Khan sent him on missions across the realm. Returning to Venice by sea in 1295, he was later held as a prisoner of war in Genoa, where he dictated his memories to the writer Rustichello da Pisa. The resulting book, known as The Travels of Marco Polo, described paper money, the imperial relay-post system and great cities such as Hangzhou. It inspired later mapmakers and explorers, among them Christopher Columbus.
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Voyages of the Age of Discovery
Marco Polo's account of his years in China later inspired European navigators, among them Christopher Columbus, who crossed the Atlantic in 1492. Amerigo Vespucci, whose name the Americas came to bear, described the lands as a New World. Vasco da Gama opened the sea route to India, Ferdinand Magellan led the first expedition to sail around the globe, and Sir Francis Drake completed the second circumnavigation.
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