Silk Road: Uzbekistan - News and Events

Even by Italian standards, Marco Polo had a magnificent name. Nearly 700 years after his death in Venice, his mischievously musical name is known from school kids to scholars, yet few people ever get around to reading his book.

Why? Because most of it's fairly boring. Yes, his travels along the Silk Road to the court of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan are astounding, and as a historical document, his narrative is sometimes questioned but mostly unparalleled. Still, it's not a compelling page-turner.

As Bergreen describes Polo, he was a "middle-aged male Scheherazade" who produced one of Europe's first great, mostly true adventure stories. That's among the facts to keep in mind about the "Travels": Polo was an almost exact contemporary of Dante, writing at a time when nonfiction accounts of such travels were unheard of. While it took centuries for his book to pass from various manuscript forms to reliable print versions, Polo deserves his place in the history of Western literature as a pioneer, an explorer of a kind, a wise guy and a fabulous publicist on his own behalf.

Polo was born in the Venetian Republic in about 1254 and traveled to the Mongol empire with his father, Niccolo, and uncle, Maffeo, when he was in his teens. The older men, who were traders and merchants, already had made the trip once; Marco joined them on their journey in 1271 and didn't return to Venice for 24 years. During many of those years, he was in the service of the Khan, a more enlightened grandson of Genghis Khan.

Eventually they returned home and when they did, dressed in the Mongol fashions they'd grown accustomed to and barely remembering their native language, their families didn't recognize them; others had moved into Niccolo's home and most didn't believe their stories.

A few years later, Marco was captured in a naval battle with Venice's rival Genoa and tossed into prison. It was there, with a Pisan cellmate and romance writer by the name of Rustichello, that he put down his memoirs to pass the time. The history of the book itself, written in Old French and originally given the title "Il Milione" -- "The Million," possibly a reference to a Polo family nickname -- is as fascinating as Polo's journey.

Of the text that has come down to us, Bergreen writes, "Like a medieval cathedral fashioned by anonymous artisans, the result is a spectacular but disorderly accretion of ideas, and of first, second and third thoughts -- an accidental monument to vanished civilizations."

Bergreen's book is much more than a biography of Polo, of whom little is known beyond his own memoir. "Marco Polo" is a cultural history of the time, a portrait of medieval Venice, a backgrounder on the Asian emperors who were vying for control in that era -- it's as all-encompassing as Polo's own ambitions in writing his book.

More Marco

"The Travels" was reissued last year in a handsome new edition by Everyman's Library, with the nearly 200-year-old translation by William Marsden. While the Marsden version has been the translation of choice for generations, Bergreen relies on a more recent translation by A.C. Moule and Paul Pelliot, based on a Latin manuscript discovered in 1932. Their version is half again as long and, judging by the excerpts in Bergreen's book, more engaging than the Marsden.

Another book of relevance to the Polo tale, also out late last year, is "The Taste of Conquest," which tells the history of three European cities that became world powers, at least for a time, because of the spice trade. Venice was the first of them, seizing upon the remains of the Byzantine empire and gaining immense trading power based on the type of spice trade the Polo clan was engaged in. Michael Krondl's ingenious book is irresistible reading on the subject.

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