Venice, 8 January 1324. The famous traveler and merchant Marco Polo died at the age of 70. About to die, the people gathered in the area asked him to recognize that what was told in the book Description of the World was a fiction, but the last words of the traveler were: “I didn’t describe half of what I saw, because I knew they didn’t believe me.” The credibility of those included in Marco Polo’s book is still being debated today.
Marco Polo was not the first European to reach China, nor the first member of his family. Father Nicolo and his uncle Maffeo traveled to Asia earlier and decided to take the young Marco with them on their second trip. But Marco was the only one who received the trip in writing and also in an attractive way, which necessarily led him to fame.
After 26 years of long journey through the East, he returned to Italy in 1295. The following year he participated in the war between Venice and Genoa. In 1298, when the Genoese took her prisoner, she was interned in the dungeon with the writer Rustichello Pisakoa. Both stayed together for about a year, and Marco Marco told us, Rustichello added a literary value to complete the World Description (or Book of Miracles of the World, or Millionaire, or Travel Book of Marco Polo). The book was immediately successful, but it was precisely that literary air that stole credibility from the story. Readers thought it was fiction.
But the main reason for questioning Marco Polo’s credibility was the Eurocentric mindset of the time and the next seven centuries.
Nor did it contribute to what happened in Asia in the coming years. Following the mandate of Kublai Kane, coinciding with the decline of the Mongol Empire, the gap between Asia and Europe was widened, and Europeans did not attend for a long time to confirm whether those described by Marco Polo were true.
But the main reason for questioning Marco Polo’s credibility was the Eurocentric mindset of the time and the next seven centuries. The Venetian traveler described cities ten times larger than Venice, cuts full of incredible luxuries, terrible engineering works, gunpowder, effective… It was impossible for those non-civilized peoples to be more advanced than Europeans.
The original version written by Rustichello has been lost and only adaptations, transcripts and written translations have arrived once. Researchers have been able to refute some of the data collected in the book and many other data could not be tested at the moment. But there are many other data that have been clearly confirmed, as Marco Polo himself brought forward 700 years ago, that the superiority of the West does not allow us to believe.