Marco Polo: Description of Hangzhou

About the Author

Marco Polo is the author of his travel accounts, while Rustichello da Pisa is the Arthurian romance writer and scribe who wrote down and probably embellished what Polo dictated. The two jointly produced The Travels of Marco Polo, sometimes referred to by the title Description of the World. Rustichello is given credit for making the text more acceptable and readable for medieval audiences. Rustichello was born in Pisa, Tuscany, in western Italy sometime in the late thirteenth century and spent time in France as an adult. He was famous as a romance writer before he met Marco Polo, having written a romance about King Arthur in a mixture of French and Italian. It is believed that he was captured by the Genoese at the Battle of Meloria in 1284, during a conflict between the Republic of Genoa and his native Pisa.

Marco Polo was born in Venice in about 1254, the son of a Venetian merchant, Niccolò Polo, who had traveled to central Asia and then to China with his brother Maffeo Polo. After they returned to Venice and picked up the seventeen-year-old Marco, they spent about three years traveling to China, where Marco Polo served in Kublai Khan’s court for the next two decades while traveling extensively in different parts of China and beyond. When the three returned to Venice in 1295, Marco Polo was forty-one, having spent the majority of his adult life in China. Historians believe it was in about 1298 that Polo was taken prisoner by the Genoese, who were then at war with the Venetians, stemming from the historic trade rivalry between the two cities. Scholars believe that as a Venetian, Polo was captured by the Genoese during the naval Battle of Curzola. Polo was released from prison in 1299 and returned to Venice. He married and had three daughters and continued as a successful merchant, but he did not leave Venice again before he died in 1324.