The Travels of Marco Polo

The Travels of Marco Polo
My ignorance and general distaste for history are likely to blame, but I, for one, was surprised to learn that Marco Polo is an actual person. Of course, I figured there was some significance to the phrase beyond its use as a swimming pool game, where a blindfolded individual closes their eyes, calls out, “Marco,” and tries to tag other players by tracking down their mandatory responses of, “Polo.” That the significance was a name, however, surprised me indeed. I would have been less surprised to learn that Marco Polo respectively meant me and you, or where and here in some obscure foreign language, fitting the two words’ purposes in the swimming pool game.
Putting aside this embarrassing rift in my education, and my aforementioned distaste for history, I actually tolerated The Travels of Marco Polo. I would be lying if I claimed that, at any time of my life, at any point in my education, I viewed required reading with anything but revulsion, the intensity of which bordered on something remarkably like hatred. This default attitude indeed applies to many parts of The Travels of Marco Polo: notably its unfortunate described time period, almost seven centuries before any date I care to think about, and the fact that I was forced to read it. I was surprised yet again, though, when I discovered aspects of the book that I actually enjoyed, specifically its description of foreign locations and lifestyles – which, as a psychology and sociology oriented student, I have a weakness for where it applies to the modern world; and apparently, when pressed, the historic world.
Marco Polo’s travels and his passionate recount of those travels indicate that he shared my interests. Not only through simple logical deduction – why else, of course, would he depart from his homeland at such a young age, leaving behind the only land he had ever known in search of new ones? – but also through his book’s evident tone of curiosity and admiration. The Travels of Marco Polo was dictated in its entirety by Marco Polo himself, to a fellow prisoner in Genoa (Polo 3). Though the text has likely been revised countless times, the verbal style of its composition allows The Travels of Marco Polo to be read as a roughly direct representation of his speech (Polo 4). As such, his sentence structure and word choice can be analyzed to decipher his tone, and thus predict his feelings about the people, places and events he describes; feelings that plain text generally fails to convey.
I suppose it is worth mentioning, as an aside, that as a creative writer, I purposefully mold my writing style to reflect my speech – another, if unintentional similarity between Marco Polo and I.
Marco Polo’s feelings were most evident, to me, in his descriptions of the Mongolian empire: feelings of respect for its current leader, Kublai Khan, whose skill in war and diplomacy alike further expanded the already vast empire; of awe and perhaps envy for the empire’s more advanced technology and culture; of appreciation for its high standard of living and wealth of opportunity relative to the time period, reflected by the curious traveler who so easily gained and so benefitted from the emperor’s favor (Polo 95-96).
I do not think, however, that Marco Polo’s admiration for the Mongolian empire – specifically during the empire of Kublai Khan – quite captured the truth of the foreign land at the time. Throughout his residence, Marco Polo saw its very best: an empire of staggering, and to this day, unrivaled size, with numerous prospering territories ranging from towns to cities in size, governed by capable rulers through the extension of Kublai Khan’s authority, each benefiting from and contributing to advanced technology and culture, and featuring a quality standard of living for their inhabitants (Polo 108-111). But though I cannot deny the Mongolian empire’s size and prosperity, I wonder if, knowing the full truth of its emergence, Marco Polo could speak of it so lovingly.
At the core of this enlightened world was the darkness that had swallowed its vast and once independent lands; a darkness born from Genghis Khan, a general renowned throughout the local lands and even in Europe for his unquenchable thirst for conquest, his skill in formulating those conquests, and his ruthlessness in enacting them (Rugoff xvii-xviii). To call Genghis Khan a conqueror is to call Hitler a murderer, titles whose technical accuracy cannot encompass the atrocities of those who held them. Genghis Khan did not merely conquer; he completely destroyed the civilizations unfortunate enough to be caught in his sights. Through his brutality, Genghis Khan played by far the largest part in extending the Mongolian empire, an empire further expanded by those who followed in his footsteps; among them his son, Ogodai, who drove southward into China, leaving a trail of conquest; and Batu, Ogodai’s nephew, who together with Subotai – one of Genghis Khan’s old generals – drove through Russia in the west and into Poland, indiscriminately destroying Kiev, Kracow, and several other cities of both nations, routing Hungary’s army of one hundred thousand strong and proceeding to devastate Pest on the Danube. By the following winter, a column of Batu and Subotai’s army deviated south into Dalmatia, and, standing on the shores of both the Danube and the Adriatic, set their greedy sights on Europe, whose nations and inhabitants lay trembling in fear of the “Tartars” – denizens of the hellish land Tartarus – who they knew, in just a matter of time, would come for them as well (Rugoff xvii-xviii).
My point, in short, is that the massive, sophisticated empire Marco Polo so idolized did not emerge from the favored emperor he likewise idolized. The enlightened empire he beheld was forged contrary to its nature; not through the cunning of Kublai Khan, but through the bloodthirst of Genghis Khan and his followers, a ruthless, almost demonic thirst for conquest that was feared and despised by the Europeans of Marco Polo’s homeland and many other lands (Rugoff xvii-xviii). Marco Polo praised the end that was the culturally and technologically superior Mongolian empire, with incomplete knowledge of the means that produced that end. I wonder if he would have been so impressed by an empire that never benefitted from Genghis Khan’s leadership. The Mongolian empire would surely still have grown under the effective, if outclassed leadership of Kublai Khan, but compared to that of Genghis Khan, could very well have turned out perhaps half or a quarter the size (Polo 95-96).
But perhaps size is not what Marco Polo saw in the Mongolian empire. Perhaps, like myself, Marco Polo viewed size as a means to an end – a source of natural resources, farm land, and a large work force to build upon the important characteristics of an empire: its advancement of technology and culture, and the standard of living for its inhabitants.
Theory aside, the Mongolian empire was what it was; an enlightened empire born of a hellish darkness. And no matter the quality of the end this darkness produced, the means are an unconcealable disfiguration of the end’s beauty to those with knowledge of them. The question is, after gaining such knowledge, could Marco Polo have seen past such terrible scarring to the beauty upon which he had once lavished praise?
To pose the question in an ancient context, can the size, length and military significance of the Great Wall of China truly be appreciated, with so many bodies amongst its foundations?
To pose the question in a modern context: though Germany quite arguably became a more powerful nation under Hitler’s rule, with expanded territory, advanced weaponry and renewed patriotism, can I, in good conscience, commend this rapid improvement, knowing the evil that escalated alongside it?
I find that my answer to all three forms of this question – if reluctant, in the first two contexts – is no. And I suspect that in this, too, based on our established similarities, Marco Polo and I might be in agreement.
Another aspect of The Travels of Marco Polo I found interesting was the parallels between Marco Polo’s experiences in the foreign lands he explored, and my own experiences with foreign lands in the present. For example, Marco Polo was welcomed to Kublai Khan’s court with something best described as curiosity, and which quickly developed into respect. Eager for stories of foreign nations, Kublai Khan sent Marco Polo on several missions. He returned from each journey with more knowledge than the last, pleasing the emperor with stories of unusual customs and foreign novelties. And again, each time, Kublai Khan sent him back for more. Marco Polo, sharing Kublai Khan’s curiosity – and my curiosity – for foreign cultures, was happy to oblige (Rugoff xxi).
This curiosity shared between them mirrors my experiences with a girl I met on vacation in Switzerland; a college student and communications major. For over an hour, hurdling over frequent and often unexpected language barriers – I knew only the simplest of phrases, and though she spoke English with skill far beyond her three years of foreign language class, she was far from fluent – we traded questions about our schedules, diets, interests, and overall lifestyles in our respective homelands, each trade producing more questions than it answered. One standout feature of this conversation was our respective admiration – for lack of a better word – for the other’s descriptions of their lifestyle. The grass is always greener, so to speak; odds and ends of my home life that I never gave any thought inspired in her great interest, like the rapid development, propagation and usually elimination of unique slang terms. She knew the English definitions and usages of the words muscular and swollen, but could not quite comprehend swoll as a slang term for somebody with muscular bulk. Likewise, I was shocked to learn that in Switzerland, a 15% gratuity is automatically included in the prices of all menu items, and that further tipping is not expected, and extremely rare – and never, ever higher than an additional 10%, when I had been trained since birth to manually tip between 10% and 15%. A small thing, to be sure, but to this day it had the greatest lasting effect on me out of anything we talked about. In cultural relations, I have found the smallest oddities tend to have more of an effect than significant differences. People expect foreign cultures to be significantly different, and of course they always are; but, in the end, people take the small, insignificant things for granted as the norm, and in expecting all relevant cultural differences to be major and obvious, the small differences tend to find chinks in the armor of our expectations.
Before The Travels of Marco Polo, I considered that conversation solely responsible for my developing interest in sociology, specifically foreign lifestyles; now I sense another contender. I cannot claim to have actually enjoyed the book as a whole, but The Travels of Marco Polo re-introduced me to interests I thought I had long-forgotten – or perhaps unconsciously buried in pursuit of other interests – and encouraged me to explore them beyond that one conversation, and this one book. Perhaps, though, I am being too generous to the book when it was actually Marco Polo himself, and our key similarities, who opened my eyes – or removed the blindfold.

Work Cited
Polo, Marco. The Travels of Marco Polo. Ed. Milton Rugoff. New York: New American Library, 2004. Print.

Cited: Polo, Marco. The Travels of Marco Polo. Ed. Milton Rugoff. New York: New American Library, 2004. Print.