Marco Polo and Rustichello da Pisa dictate the book that opens Asia to European readers

Story: 1298 C.E.  |  Last updated: January 1, 1298

In a Genoese prison cell, two men — a Venetian merchant who had crossed the known world and a romance writer from Pisa — sat together and changed what Europeans thought the world contained. The result was a book so astonishing that many readers assumed it was fiction. Some still debate it.

What the evidence shows

• Marco Polo’s travels: Polo left Venice in 1271 C.E. and spent roughly 17 years in Asia, including years of service at the court of Kublai Khan, before returning to Venice in 1295 C.E.
• The Travels of Marco Polo: The book was composed in 1298–1299 C.E. when Polo dictated his accounts to Rustichello da Pisa, a professional writer of romances, while both were prisoners of the Genoese Republic.
• Franco-Venetian manuscript: Rustichello wrote the original text in Franco-Venetian, a literary language of northern Italy; about 150 copies in various languages survive, though the original manuscripts are lost.

A collaboration born in captivity

Marco Polo had not traveled alone. His father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo — both of whom had already visited China once before — accompanied him on the 1271 C.E. journey. Yet neither of them left a written account. It was only the accident of war and imprisonment that produced the book the world received.

Genoese and Venetian forces clashed in 1298 C.E. Polo was captured and held in Genoa, where he met Rustichello da Pisa. The scholar Ronald Latham described the resulting work as a genuine collaboration: Rustichello likely worked from Polo’s oral accounts and possibly his notes, shaping them in the same “leisurely, conversational style” that marked his other writing. Some passages were borrowed nearly verbatim from Rustichello’s earlier Arthurian romances — including the opening address to “emperors and kings, dukes and marquises,” lifted wholesale from a romance he had written years before.

This matters. The Travels of Marco Polo — known in Italian as Il Milione and in French as Livres des Merveilles du Monde — was not a dry dispatch. It was a shaped narrative, written for an audience hungry for wonder. Rustichello knew what medieval European readers expected from a travel book, and he gave it to them.

What the book actually described

The work is divided into four books. The first covers the Middle East and Central Asia. The second — the heart of it — describes China, which Polo called Cathay in the north and Manji in the south, and the court of Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan. The third turns to coastal Asia: Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and the east coast of Africa. The fourth describes wars among the Mongols and the far northern regions including Russia.

Polo emerges from the text as observant, curious, and largely tolerant — a man genuinely devoted to Kublai Khan and the Mongol dynasty he served for nearly two decades. Economic historian Mark Elvin, reviewing the scholarship, concluded that the book is “in essence, authentic, and, when used with care, in broad terms to be trusted as a serious though obviously not always final, witness.”

That said, Polo reportedly told a Dominican friar on his deathbed that he had described only half of what he had seen. Whether that was modesty, regret, or something else, we do not know.

How it spread — and who helped it spread

The book was a rare popular success in an era before the printing press. It was translated into many European languages during Polo’s own lifetime. Dominican friars played an unexpected role in its circulation: Italian scholar Antonio Montefusco’s research suggests that the Order collaborated on a Latin translation, seeing Polo’s account as useful intelligence for missionary work in the East. The diplomatic correspondence between the papacy and the Mongol court — including a baptism at the Second Council of Lyon and Pope Gregory X’s discussions of a Christian-Mongol alliance — made Asia a live political concern for the Church.

The book’s influence on cartography came more slowly. The first map to incorporate Polo’s place names was the Catalan Atlas of 1375 C.E., which included about 30 names in China and numerous other Asian toponyms. By the mid-15th century, the Venetian cartographer Fra Mauro had incorporated all of Polo’s place names into his celebrated 1450 C.E. world map.

And then there is Christopher Columbus. A heavily annotated copy of Polo’s book was among his belongings when he sailed west in 1492 C.E. — which is to say that a Venetian merchant’s account of Kublai Khan’s court, written down by a Pisan romance writer in a Genoese prison, helped set the coordinates for a voyage that would alter the shape of the known world once more.

Lasting impact

The immediate effect of The Travels of Marco Polo was to populate the European imagination with a detailed, named, and navigable Asia. Before Polo, European maps of Asia were largely fantastical. After him, they began — slowly, imperfectly — to correspond to geography.

The longer effect is harder to measure but perhaps more significant. The book established a genre: the firsthand account of the distant world, written for readers who would never go there, designed to make the unfamiliar feel real. It modeled a kind of curiosity that was neither conquest nor condemnation — Polo rarely judged what he observed, even when it was entirely foreign to his experience.

That model of engaged, non-moralizing observation rippled forward through centuries of travel writing, natural history, and eventually journalism. The idea that the world beyond one’s horizon was worth describing accurately and with respect — not merely as a theater for projection — owes something to a Venetian merchant’s willingness to talk, and a Pisan writer’s willingness to listen.

The book also demonstrated, in the most concrete way, that the Silk Road was not an abstraction. Long-distance trade connecting the Mediterranean world to East Asia was real, sustained, and already ancient by the time Polo traversed it. Indigenous knowledge systems along the route — the hospitality networks, the caravanserais, the multilingual merchants — made his journey possible. The book rarely acknowledges these debts, but they are present in every page.

Blindspots and limits

The scholarly debate over whether Polo actually visited China at all has never been fully resolved. Critics note that he fails to mention the Great Wall, chopsticks, tea, or foot-binding — conspicuous omissions for someone who claimed two decades at the heart of Chinese court life. Some researchers have proposed that Polo may have traveled only as far as Persia and compiled his China account from secondhand sources.

The mainstream consensus leans toward authenticity, but with significant caveats: Rustichello’s editorial hand is everywhere, some passages are borrowed from other texts entirely, and the line between what Polo witnessed and what he was told — or what Rustichello embellished — cannot always be drawn. The book is a collaboration, a translation, and a product of its time. Reading it as unmediated eyewitness testimony is a mistake. Reading it as useless is an equal mistake in the opposite direction.

Women are almost entirely absent from the account — present only as objects of description or exchange. The peoples Polo encountered are observed with curiosity but rarely given voice. The book reflects the limits of its author’s position and his century as much as it reflects the world he moved through.

Read more

For more on this story, see: The Travels of Marco Polo — Wikipedia

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