Book review – Marco Polo- from Venice to Xanadu

Marco Polo - From Venice to Vanadu by Laurence Bergreen

In this age of an avoidance of corporate responsibility it is salutary to learn that after the defeat of the Venetian navy by the Genoese fleet off Curzola in 1298 the Venetian admiral, Andrea Dandolo, felt it appropriate to lash himself to the mast of his flagship and beat his head against the hardened wood until his skull fractured.

Of equal interest is the fate of one of his commanders, the returned world traveller Marco Polo, who was carried off with the better class of captives to languish in the Palazzo di San Georgio in Genoa.

It was during the years of captivity that Marco Polo, wearied by constant repetition of his tales of travels to Cambulac, Samarkand, the gold and silver roofed city of Pagan and the then largest city in the world the utterly unknown Quinsai (Hangzhou) allowed Rustichello of Pisa to take down some of his amazing tales – initially in demotic French – and publish the first edition of what is without doubt one of the most influential books in the history of the world – a work called “Description of the World” and known now to all as Marco Polo’s “Travels”.

Laurence Bergreen has written, in “Marco Polo – From Venice to Xanadu” the best and most readably account of the life of the Venetian merchant, traveller, linguist, theological student, diplomat, ambassador, military commander who left his home in 1271 as a teenage boy to accompany his father and uncle on a journey that was motivated by the honest avarice of the trader but which took them not only to the very limits of the worlds as known to Europeans but far beyond to lands unknown.