Marco Polo (c. 1254-1324) was a Venetian merchant who left Venice in 1271, at about seventeen, with his father Niccolò and his uncle Maffeo, who had already visited the Mongol court once. The Polos reached Kublai Khan around 1275 and remained in his service for some seventeen years, during which Marco travelled on the Khan's business through much of China. They returned by sea between about 1292 and 1295, escorting a Mongol princess to Persia. Captured in the war between Venice and Genoa, Marco dictated his account in a Genoese prison in 1298 to Rustichello da Pisa, a writer of Arthurian romances. He was later released, married Donata Badoer, had three daughters, and died in Venice in January 1324.
The book, known in Italy as Il Milione and in early French manuscripts as the Devisement du Monde (Description of the World), is less a diary than a geography of Asia as the Polos knew it, organized by route and region and told in the voice of Rustichello, who often addresses the reader directly. The Prologue tells how the Venetian brothers Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, trading in the Crimea and on the Volga in the 1260s, were carried by war farther and farther east until envoys brought them to Kublai, the Great Kaan of the Tartars, who questioned them about the Pope and the Christian faith and sent them back to Rome asking for a hundred learned Christians and oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre.
