June 6, 2023 • 40 mins
Professor of History Dr. Pat Larash and author Ben Thompson continue the story of Marco Polo, who now embarks on his own expedition to the Far East. His adventures take him to the ends of the known world, and find him constantly embroiled in the intrigues of the Mongol Khans, marching with armies, negotiating with kings, and sailing waters uncharted on any European maps. He returns home only to find himself imprisoned in a tower -- and his story is only told to the outside world thanks to an unlikely encounter with a fellow prisoner.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
The treasures of China and Southeast Asia are beyond anything
young Marco Polo could have imagined. Ivory palaces decorated with gold,
silver and jewels, huge sprawling fortresses that dwarf anything in Europe.
Wealth beyond his wildest dreams. Yet this strange new land
is also rife with danger. Murders, wild beasts, cannibals, pirates
(00:27):
and bandits roam the uncharted wilderness in search of prey.
And yet none of these apex predators are quite as
dangerous as the Mongol warriors with whom Marco Polo now
finds himself. They are ferocious in battle, as he has
seen many times. Yet to some of these Mongol generals,
there's a very thin line between a friend and enemy.
The rewards are great, the stakes high, the danger very real.
(00:52):
It will take cunning, wit, bravery, and a little bit
of luck if Marco Polo wishes to survive to tell
the tale of his adventure. Hello and welcome back to
Badass of the Week. My name is Ben Thompson. I'm
(01:12):
here with my co host doctor Pat Larish. And Pat
we are here to do part two of Marco Polo
and I just kind of wanted to see if maybe
we can get started by recapping kind of where we're
at at the end of part one.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, so we're calling this episode part two of Marco Polo,
but maybe it would be better to call last week's
episode like the prequel.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
It's true, we didn't actually talk about Marco very much
in part one, did we. No?
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I mean we spent time on his dad and his uncle,
And Okay, that's cool because they had adventures in their
own right and they're a badass in their own right.
And it's also setting up the scene for what's going
to happen in today's episode. And it's going to sound
kind of cliched and kind of tropy, but like, this
is the thing that happens in you know, young adult
fantasy novels. You've got this protagonist, this young protagonist whose
(02:02):
parents are absent for whatever reason. And okay, Marco Polo's
dad was not around for much of his formative years,
and then all of a sudden something happens. You know,
it's kind of like a cliche for fiction writing. You know,
a stranger comes to town. Who's the stranger, Well, it's
this guy and his brother who show up in Venice
and the docks of Venice, your.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Long last dad here for to think. But like, I
don't even know if this counts as being true because
it predates like Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter and all
of that. Maybe okay, they all got their ideas.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Quite possibly, quite possibly. Yeah, I mean you could argue
that there's some of this in the Odyssey sort of,
you know, a variation on it or whatever.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
But herded me.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Oh no, oh no, oh no. But but okay, But
the truth of the matter is, you know, given the
realities of travel, the realities of merchant roots, you know,
you can't just hop on a plane and be somewhere,
you know, at most twenty four hours later. You know,
you're like schlepping along on I don't know, like in
(03:02):
a caravan boom to boom to boom to boom, you know.
And what happens while you're gone, well, I don't know,
your kids grow up.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Yeah, And it's like, you know, it's the time period
where it's not that weird that you didn't see the
guy for fifteen years. You assume he's dead, but you're
not sure.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah dead or maybe kind of started a
new life elsewhere. But as it turns out, you know, okay,
we're in Venice, which you know is cool on its own, right,
but if you're a teenager, you might feel like you're
stuck there. And Marco Polo's here, he's in Venice. Boat
comes in his guys get off the boat. Something about
(03:41):
that one guy, Like, what is it like his face?
Is he like a doppelganger or something? Marco, I am
your father, except like in a non evil way.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
I guess, like Gandalf V and Darth Vader together. Sure?
Why not?
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah? Young Marco Polo, who is kind of full of
energy and looking for something to do, sees his dad
and his uncle and they say, would you like to
go on an adventure?
Speaker 1 (04:03):
And he says he says, hell yeah, And uh, let's
get into it. This is the story of what happened
to Marco Polo and why he's the name we remember
and not Nicolo Polo. So we're back and we are
(04:25):
talking about Marco Polo in China, his first meeting with
Kubla Khan. He is in Xanadu, which is, as we've mentioned,
is not always the roller skating disco movie, but it
is also the amazing like palace complex to the northwest
of Beijing, and Marco Polo's mind is blown. Right, He's
twenty one years old, and you got to remember he's
(04:47):
from Venice, which is probably the richest town in Europe
at the time that he is traveling here. Right, He's
from basically the New York City of Europe. He gets
here and he cannot fathom the size and scale and
opulence of the things that he's looking at. He says, attended,
you has sixteen miles of walls that go around several
(05:09):
palaces constructed entirely of marble. Kubla Khan appears to him
pulled on a chariot. There's like an amazing like throne
that's on this pedestal, like pulled by four elephants. He's
got a zoo with all these exotic animals in it.
He's got this huge like hunting ground where you can
hunt any kind of animal you want.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
I was gonna say, he said zoo, but oh please,
we called a menagerie.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah, menagerie that's a better way of phrasing it. Yeah,
Like he kuble E Khan is like there's deer in
this like hunting preserve on his property. And the way
that Kubla Khan hunts them is by bringing cheetahs out
on horseback and releasing them to go kill the deer
for him. That's like the level that we're talking about here.
(05:55):
Release the cheetah, release the cheetahs to catch the deer.
And that's how I I pointed the cheetah in the
correct direction, and therefore I am an amazing hunter. Yes,
And I mean Marco Polo has been watching the traders
come in and out of the biggest commercial hub in
Europe and he just cannot imagine what he's looking at.
(06:17):
He's like, what is this right? And Kublai Khan is
Kuba Khan is very different from the rest of the
Mongol kings and cons and stuff. He is a little
bit more cultured. He loves to hunt, he loves to fight.
That's a very Mongol thing. He likes both of those things.
But he also has kind of really adopted Chinese culture.
(06:38):
He's really kind of adopted like art and music and
kind of being cool with other religions and other people
and other ideas, and he kind of wants to accumulate.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
He's just like, hey, tell me about Christianity because I'm.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Curious, right, exactly right, Like, hey, you.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Guys are an a story in Christianity.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Sure, I mean, he's down with it. He doesn't care.
He's not Catholic, he's not in a story in christian
he is. He's Mongol religion leaning Buddhists, which is kind
of the dominant Chinese religion at this time. But he's curious.
He wants to know stuff. He's like, Okay, well, you
guys clearly have some money, You're dressed nice when you
show up. You're bringing cool stuff that I like, maybe
we can set up trade between our two peoples. Maybe
(07:18):
we can kind of grow and learn from each other.
And he presents himself as this kind of I mean,
for lack of a better word, renaissance man, because he
is going to kind of help usher in the Renaissance,
the capital r Renaissance in Europe. Him and Marco Polo
together are going to do that. But he is very
different from anybody that Marco Polo has met. And just
(07:42):
palace is on palaces, right, Like he's got his whatever,
fifteen wives or whatever, and each of them has a
palace that would rival any palace for any king in Europe.
And Marco Polo just cannot imagine the stuff when he's
looking at it, and he's got a little bit of
an inn with Kublai Khan because Kubla Khan already likes
uh Nicolo and Mafeo Polo.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
He's like, Hey, you're my guys who go on missions
for me.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yeah, and he's like, well you, you know you kind
of I wanted a hundred guys, and you brought me
one really good one, so maybe maybe that's worth it.
He brought the other stuff like, we're kind of we're
negotiating here. We're doing some prime directivy kind of stuff
where we're building bonds between our people without war. That's awesome,
and Marco Polo makes an impression on Kublai basically immediately.
(08:28):
Marco Polo is very interesting because he's not what you
would expect from like a European explorer traveling to the
Far East in the Middle Ages. He's on board with everything.
He's like, I like silk, this feels awesome. I'll wear it,
you know, I'll try your your food I've never had before,
like this, look this looks great. Yeah, but also the
spicest thing that nobody's had cuman before, turmeric or whatever
(08:50):
else goes into chatika masala. But yeah, so he's kind
of on board with everything, and he runs this very
interesting and very good like diplomatic line between being he's
cool and he's personal and he's friendly and he's nice,
and he gets along really well with koble I Khan,
and he doesn't like do the thing that a lot
of Europeans do at this time, which is like be
(09:12):
too hardcore about the religious thing, you know, like, yeah,
you got your religion, that's cool, you can do your thing.
I'm not going to tell you how to live your life,
and I'm not going to, like, I don't know, try
to chop your head off because you're Buddhist or whatever.
You know. Yeah, he dresses in the low clothes, he
learns the language. He kind of kind of integrates himself
into the society in a way that I think a
(09:34):
lot of Europeans wouldn't have at this time. And I
think that there are some things in his writing that
are a little bit problematic looking at it from twenty
twenty two, But for twelve seventy, this guy is like
he is along for the ride and he is kind
of going with it, and it's it's great, it's very refreshed.
I was very like happily surprised when I started reading
(09:57):
some of some of the stuff that he wrote about this.
It was definitely better than I was expecting. And he
just kind of integrates himself and becomes friends with the
con basically right away, as does right. He's funny and
he's smart. Yeah, but he's also smart enough to know
when to not piss off the Mongols, because that is
also an important thing that you need to kind of
(10:19):
manage when you are more or less a prisoner of
the con not.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
To self, do not piss off the Mongols when.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
You are at the Mongol hordes mercy. You should just
kind of try to swallow your pride every once in
a while, roll with it. And he's very good at it.
He's good at it, and he does a good job
of it. And he even more than Nicolo and Mafeo.
He kind of rises above them even and to become
a favorite of Kublai Khan. So for the next seventeen years,
(10:50):
Marco Pullo remains in China. He is an emissary. He's
a diplomatic emissary. He goes on diplomatic missions. He translates documents,
he does some trading stuff even like serves as the
Khan's representative like administrative representative over the city of yang
Zho for a while. He does whatever the Khan needs
him to do.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Okay, So he's so he's an outsider, he's a foreigner,
and he somehow manages to find a place in the
civil service.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Or yeah, and it works well for Kublai because Kublai
Khan is also an outsider. He's a Mongol administering over
Han Chinese. And so he relates to Marco Polo in
some way, like they find this common ground on like
we're both kind of running the show here, but neither
of us are from here, neither of us are we're
both kind of out of our depth, and there's a
(11:37):
lot of people here who wish we weren't here. So
there's a you know, there's you're able to kind of
find some common ground there. And Marco Polo starts going
on travels all over Asia. He goes to Japan, he
goes to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, he goes to some
of the islands, he goes to India. He's traveling all
over the place, and he sees all kinds of crazy stuff, right,
(11:59):
Ivory palaces, gold, silver jewels, fine silks. He's eating the
best foods and the spices he's getting all of like
the stuff that he's sharing dinner with the Khan. Right, diamonds,
I'm getting hungry. Yeah, It's like there's diamonds, and then
there's there's scars from Cashmir, there's Ivory. There's these huge
sprawling fortresses and cities and palaces all over all over
(12:23):
the empire that he is just amazed by, right, things
that you know, cities that dwarf anything that is known
to the Europeans at the time. Right, And like I
keep saying, he's from the one of the more cosmopolitan
areas of Europe. But when he gets to China, he's
just like, dude, you have no idea. Yeah, Venice is,
Venice is the share It's amazing. I was there last
(12:45):
summer and my mind was blown. But his mind was
blown just as hard.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Like Venice had its own empires.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Yeah, but yeah, yeah, it spanned most of the Adriatic, right,
like Golden Pagodas in Burma. And he goes to hang Zhou,
which has this huge lake in the middle of it.
That's beautiful. It's got millions of inhabitants, which is mind
blowing for him at the time. Right, Venice had one
main square and Hangzho has ten and each one of
them is a half mile by a half mile.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Oh wow.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
And it's like Kublei Khan. The way he describes it
and the way that he always referred to China was
that like the difference between China and Europe is that
Kublai Khan counts his money and his people and his
scale in the millions, which nobody in Europe was doing
at the time.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Right, yeah, he gets it. Marco Pol gets a nickname
later in his life, Marco Millions, because that's all he
talks about is how he million, Yeah EMILIONI yeah. Hell,
he talks about how Kublai measured things in millions, and
he talks about it so much, and he becomes a
name known as Marco millions.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Marko millions. That's it. That sounds like a rapper name.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
Oh for me, I was thinking, I was thinking mob guy. Okay, yeah,
Machael millions. He sees some dangerous stuff, right, he encounters
cannibals and Sumatra. He encounters bandits and pirates. There's a
group in me and mar that would kill travelers and
cut them up because they wanted to steal their souls.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Ooh, that's harsh.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
And Marco millions goes there on a mission from the
Cohn to tell them to stop doing that.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Okay, how does this go? Does Marco succeed in telling
them to stop cutting up people? Or does Marco himself
get cut up into pieces?
Speaker 1 (14:23):
They do not cut him up and turn him into pieces,
when presumably when you are the mouth of Kublai Khan,
you're prevented from that particular superstition.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Okay, that might give you some credit.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Yeah, yeah, So he sees unimaginable works of construction and
jungle like stuff that you don't have in Europe. Right,
even just going into a jungle, it'd be mind blowing
for a European.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Yeah, Like, if you're from Venice, there's like deeply cool
shit in Venice and you're just like, whoa.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
It's heavily forested, right, that's how they built the whole city.
They just sunk logs into the lagoon and built the
city on top of it.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
But that was like before and like the trees are
now substructure. Yeah, and then you're Marco Polo and you're like,
oh wow, I'm in the jungle.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
You're in a rainforest, which, like can you imagine being
dropped into Vietnam from like France? He's foreign science fiction, right. Yeah,
He's seeing all these animals he's never seen before, right,
Camel's horses. He rides on Camel's horses and elephants. Just
on his way to China. He rides Cammel's horses and elephants.
When he's there, he's seeing lions, tigers, elephants. He sees
(15:28):
what he calls unicorns, which we think are probably rhinos
one horn, big four legs, one horn. He doesn't, he
just mentions him in passing. It's like, yeah, if you
like unicorns, they got unicorns here. But we think he's
probably talking about rhinos.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Okay, okay, So he mentions these in past in passing.
So he sees a creature that he believes is a unicorn,
or he might be a unicorn, and that's not the
most important thing that he's talking.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
He was more focused on the dudes that were gonna
kill him and eat his soul than he was on
the rhinos fair.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Point, fair point, Okay, like, oh wow, mythical creature, dude,
you no, no, no, don't.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Kill He sees he sees guys off the coast of
Singapore that are called shark charmers that like keep the
sharks away from the fisherman. He hunts. He hunts wolves.
He uses eagles to hunt wolves, and he uses cheetahs
to hunt deer.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Well, he uses eagles.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
That's like a Mongol thing, totally a Mongol thing, right,
the Mongols love to fight and hunt, and Kubla Khun.
No matter how cultured he is, how advanced he is
among the Mongol people, he has still got that Mongol
heart and he likes to kill things and he hunts.
Yeah yeah, the golden eagles that like kill wolves.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
But yeah, but like the thing about the like hunting
with eagles, that's a thing even to today.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Yeah yeah, yeah, So he goes and does that. He
does the cheetah hunting thing, which I don't think is
a deal anymore. I don't think they have cheetahs in
Asia anymore. But I mean it's animal planet stuff, right,
it's but it's also a science fiction is like a
D and D adventure, right, where he's seeing all these
crazy monsters and man eating creatures. He's in sumatrass tigers right,
Like they don't have any of the stuff where he
came from. Yeah, and it's blowing his mind. But he's
(17:09):
he's doing this and then he gets he works his
way up. I mean seventeen years a long time. He's
doing all of these things. While he's there, he eventually
gets promoted up to you know, as the Mongols are.
When you get promoted high enough, you suddenly start taking
on military details, right as one does. Right. So he
starts marching with the Mongol army on missions to like
quell bandits, or expand the empire, or do various Mongol
(17:33):
related things. So he is marching at the head of
an army of two hundred thousand mounted Mongols. And I
want to put this in perspective.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Yeah, the two hundred thousand mounted Mongols. So this is
two hundred thousand human beings on two hundred thousand horses.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
They usually would carry three horses. So this is the
point I want to make, And this is the point
that I think is very important when understanding Marco Polo
that we need to talk about, which is the scale
of what he is experienced is not on the level
of anything anybody in Europe could comprehend. So let's look
for reference. Let's look at the big battle that created
(18:11):
England as we know it today. Right, the Battle of
Hastings ten sixty six. It's two hudred years before this,
but time progresses. Everybody's still riding on horseback and shooting
bow and arrows and fighting with swords. Right, it's two
undred years but like, not a lot has changed. Technologically,
Willing the conqueror had a stirrups, but that's you know,
that was like the technological advancement over the Romans. And
so Battle of Hastings Wood the conqueror goes and he fights,
(18:33):
and he defeats the he defeats the Saxons, and he
takes over England. We don't know for sure, but best
estimate twenty thousand soldiers total among both sides combined. Marco
Polo is riding at the head of an army that
is ten times the size of that entire battlefield. Wow,
it's something that we need to think about while we
talk about him, because, you know, one thing that is
(18:56):
kind of a challenge when talking about Marco polo. Is
that Like we've seen pictures of all this stuff that
he's talking about, and we've you can go to a
zoo and see our rhino now. And two hundred and
fifty thousand guys is smaller than the current US army,
but compared to what was going on in Europe twelve hundred,
this is out of control.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Yeah. And also just in like actual human terms, like
as a human being on the ground, how big is
two hundred thousand?
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Do you imagine the sound of two hundred thousand horses
riding by you? Like, yeah, we'll take an hour for
them to all ride past you, right, maybe longer?
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Yeah, And how does an actual human being conceptualize two
hundred thousand? Like if one goes to a football stadium.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Depends on the stadium, but you're looking at sixty maybe yeah,
three football stadiums or the people, and that would be
like NFL stadiums, not like the high school football stadiums
unless you're in Texas.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Right, Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Marco's there for some pretty big battles. So he's going
into I mean, he travels everywhere, right, So he's going
through jungle, He's passing through ancient ruins, of old like
Kimer and old Viet like ruins in the jungle. Right, Yeah,
he's going through the Gobi desert going there's old ruins,
there's current stuff. He's fighting in the desert, he's fighting
(20:17):
in the jungle. He's traveling everywhere. Over these seventeen years,
he gets sent everywhere that he can possibly go, and
he's leading these armies, and he starts to get a
little bit disillusioned by what's going on. So he likes
all of this opulence and the spices. He loves the like,
he loves the food, he loves the language, he loves
(20:37):
the culture, he loves the dress and all of this stuff.
He doesn't love the slaughtering of the women and children.
He doesn't love the like launching catapults at buildings and
killing people and beheading all of the surviving men and
the real like nitty gritty Mongols stuff that the Mongols
are still doing at this time period. This kind of like,
(20:59):
like I said, Kubla likes to hunt and he likes
to fight, and he likes to wage war and he
likes to you know, subject his enemies to his wrath.
But from Marc and Polo, this doesn't fit the idea
of google icon that he had of this kind of
cultured renaissance man. When he's standing on this field watching
the Mongol army like behead prisoners of war and women
(21:20):
and children, he he doesn't like it, and he's like, oh,
maybe he actually this guy is not as awesome as
I thought he was. Yeah, And he starts to get
a little bit sad once he gets into this level
of power where he's marching with the army, Like it
was really fun when we all dressed up and march
in a parade, but it's it's less fun now that
I'm standing on this blood soaked sand with a streaming
(21:44):
for their families made.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Yeah, no, I say so, I say, he gets to
see the sasage being made. But it's like no, it's
like he gets to see humans being decapitated.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
The sage being made. It's like a great example, right,
like that's how these people are being treated, right like
this is this is that's how like these Mongol lieutenants
dealt with their prisoners. Right. Yeah, it's brutal and it's
awful and it's you know, it's one thing to be
like the you know, drive your enemies before you hear
the lamentations of their women. But it's a very different
thing to I mean, that's a Ganghis con quote. I
(22:15):
should stipulate that.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Yeah, you know, to actually hear the lamentations.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
It's very different to be standing there watching that happen,
you know, Yeah, because it takes hours, you know, when
it's not.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Like okay, it takes hours. And also it's like horrific.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Right exactly, you're just standing there watching like a horror
movie for hours, right, like ye brutal, brutal stuff. And
he did not like it. He was not a fan
of this, so that starts a disillusion. And the other
thing that he's thinking at this point is that like
he's been there seventeen years, Kublai Khan he was, he's
he was twenty one when he got there, but Kubla
Khan was older. Kubla Khan's old now, right, Kuble Khan
(22:49):
doesn't have much longer to live. And you know, when
you're eco polo and you work your way in close
with the Khan of the Mongol Horde, you don't do
that without making a few enemies. He's in court who
are also Mongol warriors who may succeed Kublai Khan is
the Khan, and Marco, Polo and Nicolo and Mafeo, his
(23:10):
dad and his uncle were like, we got to get
out of here before Koubli dies, because when Kubli dies,
we're done for right, Like we're going to be on
the first wave of purges for whoever replaces him. So
we got to go. So they go to Kublai and like,
we got to go, and Kublai is like, no, you're
too valuable, you can't leave. Oh, So they have to
ask him like five or six times. It takes them
(23:31):
a couple years before he finally lets them go. So
he does eventually let them go. In twelve ninety one,
he gives them the mission to escort his daughter, the
Princess Cocochin. She's going to go to Persia to seal
a marriage alliance with the Ilkanate. So it's not Hulagu
Khan anymore, but it's that part of the that section
(23:53):
of the of the Horde. So this is probably incestuous
in some way to some degree, but Kublai Khan's daughter
is going to go marry Hulagu Khan's nephew or whatever,
you know, but.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Maybe this is like this is like baseline.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah, it's not full Valirian, but it's it's a little Habsburgian.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
I guess, yeah, yeah, And I guess like this is
just sort of what happens among royal houses.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Yeah, that's how you get That's how you get resputant.
You get everybody having hemophilia, and that's how you end
up with resputing. Okay, So they are going to go
by sea, which is a kind of a new thing
for Marco Polo. He's sailed to a bunch of the
islands and stuff, but this is the farthest he's going
to have traveled by sea.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
So we're in the thirteenth century, and so sea routs
from China maybe not completely established.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Or no lots of pirates happening here. It's dangerous. He's
traveling with the princess of the Bungo Empire, so he's
he's not too worried about it. He's got a pretty
big bodyguard on turage around him.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Okay, good for him.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
And so they go to Singapore, they go to Sumatra,
they go to India, and then from India they go
by land through Persia, drop off the Princess No problems
continue on towards the Black Sea and eventually decide they're
going to sell for home. They don't want to go
back because there's too many enemies for them in China.
And after twenty four years and maybe somewhere between fifteen
(25:27):
and twenty thousand miles, Oh wow, Marco Polo finally returns
to Venice.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
And what's Venice like when he is back?
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Like Venice is he returns home to Venice, and he
didn't have much there, right, he had his uncle and
his aunt and raised him, but like he didn't have
much to go home too. He didn't have like a
wife and kids or anything like that there. He goes
back and Venice is at war with the Italian city
of Genoa. You have all these Italian city states at
the time, so Genoa and Venice are at war. So
(25:57):
Marco Polo is like, well, okay, I'll fight to defend Venice.
He he comes back, he's incredibly wealthy. He's got all
of these treasures and all these things he brought back
from China with him, but he also has feels this
responsibility to his hometown against the Genuines, and he he
feels loyalty to Venice, so he goes to fight for them.
He buys a boat, and he buys a tribute, and
he puts the tribute on his boat, and he goes
(26:19):
to fight the ticket.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
He has a boat, and he puts the treb on
the boat.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yes, that's awesome, yeah yeah, and he commands it and
he hires a crew and he commands it in battle
for Venice against Genoa. And uh, he's defeated. Yes, he
is in on a boat with the tribute on a boat.
He is defeated somewhere off the coast of of of Turkey,
(26:46):
possibly at the Battle of Curzola, which is a huge
battle that happened around this time period. Venice was this
up and coming like very powerful trade empire. Genoa was
arguing with them. There was a huge battle that took
place around this time and something like one hundred Venetian
galleys on one side, eighty genomen on the other. Huge losses,
(27:09):
huge destruction, lots of death, nothing like he'd seen with
the Mongols, but lots of death and destruction and dying.
And Marco Polo and the Venetians are crushed, right, And
there was a chance that this type might break the
Venetian Republic. They recover, but this was really really dark
moment for Venice's history. So Marco Polo is defeated. He surrenders,
his ship is bashed up, a lot of his crew
(27:31):
are dead, the Venetian fleet is mostly destroyed. He is
put in shackles and his ship is towed from the
waters off the coast of Adana, Turkey, to Genoa, and
he is imprisoned in a tower in Genoa overlooking the
sea there. And he is kind of just thrown into
this tower and locked up.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Oh no, so our boys in the slammer.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
He's in the slammer for just like for forty years.
He's imprisoned for four years by the Genuines. His cellmate
is another person who had been captured by the Genoans.
His cellmate in the tower is a dude named Rusticello,
which I don't know if the ch is a hard
ch or a soft cich Rusta Kello to Pisa. He
(28:18):
was a dude from Pisa who the Genoins had overtaken
that and they took this guy and they imprisoned him
in the tower. Roosta Kello Pisa is the first Italian
person to write about King Arthur and the Knights of
the Round Table in Italy. He was a famous author
who had written King Arthur's stories for the people of Italy.
(28:38):
He wrote in French, and he wrote an Italian. He
was a best selling author who had been kind of
imprisoned and thrown in this tower. And he is Marco
Polo's cellmate. And here is a thing that is one
hundred percent worth mentioning when talking about Marco Polo is
that he had no intention of telling anybody about what
he had done in China until he was locked in
(29:00):
a tower with this best selling fiction writer for four years.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
So it's like if like in some like alternate timeline,
I go out and have adventures and then somehow I
wind up being locked in a cell with like Stephen
King or something.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
Right, and you have nothing to do except talk about
your lives. Yeah, Marco Polo is just like, well, yeah,
I was in China for a while, and Rista Kello's like, okay,
what'd you do there? Get to pen and then over
the course of this four years they write Marco Polo's memoirs,
which he had no intention of doing, which I love
and I feel like I cannot stress enough. But he
(29:37):
had no plans to write any of this down, or at.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Least that's what he said, right, that's the stick that
he's that's the persona that he's.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
I don't know, I believe it's accurate because when you
read this stuff that he wrote, he is a business guy,
he's a finance It's very clear that he was very
personable in real life. But when he the way he
thinks about things like then this had it had twelve gates,
and it had forty seven bridges, and then we ate
this and it was made out of this. It had
(30:07):
this much weight of marble on it, and bapa ba.
He's just like he's a bean counter. Yeah, and he
talks like he writes like a bean counter. But Rustacello
is like, I think I can spice this up a
little bit.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Spice yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
And over the course of four years they write this,
this story of Marco Polo's adventures in China, and in
twelve ninety nine the war between Genoa and Venice ends
and they're released and they go to publish it, and
Marco Polo wants to call it called the book Description
of the World, which is a very Marco Polo thing
(30:44):
that he would want to do, that's what he would
want to call it. Rustacello decides he wants to call
it the Great Book of Marvels of the World. Right.
The Italians know it as The Millions a Million, Yeah,
because that's that was Marco's nickname later on in life,
and that's what they call the book, is the Millions.
In English, we just call it the Travels of Marco Polo.
(31:04):
But whatever the names, this blew everyone's minds. And it's
what you said. It is written an illuminated manuscript by
a professional, by a best selling romance author. This is
the movie adaptation of Marco Polo's life, written like with
with the author's help by a dude who is like
good at this stuff, right, and so when it comes out,
(31:27):
between the animal stuff and the travels and all that,
like everything that comes out, this is like reading a
sci fi story, right, It's like reading it's like reading
Gulliver's Travels right for the later generation, right, like like
what this does? No way this exists in real life.
And that's one thing I love about it. Everybody on
the time period was like this bullshit, all of shit, right,
(31:48):
Like there's no way this happened.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Like this is comic book.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
No way, you're totally lying fantasy, right, And even today
when we can Google image for some of this stuff,
like there's there's people who are like, no, you was
lying because it's said that like that Xanadua had twenty
seven gates, but we know from the schematics that I
actually had twenty five, So he's totally exaggerating. He probably
didn't even go there. And it's like, Okay, look, he
(32:13):
is writing about things that he remembered from seventeen years before,
and it's being filtered through another dude, a best selling
fiction novelist.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
And the original manuscript of this was written in a
language called Franco Venetian, which was then translated into all
these other languages, and things got lost in translation, and
also the other translators interpreted their own stuff. Their entire
passages appear in various translations of this book that don't
appear in the original. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
And honestly, going specifically, I feel like, do that have
twenty five gates or twenty seven gates? When you're talking
about manuscripts, numbers are like the most likely to get
messed up because they're just so arbitrary.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
You know, I don't remember how old I am like
half the.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
Time, same, same, Yeah, I'm definitely not going to like
if you ask me how many windows there are in
the front of my house, I don't think I could
tell you accurately.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
You know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Yeah, And Marco Polo like is right about a lot
of this stuff because he does remember these things because
he is a bean counter. So he is right about
a lot of this stuff. But like, like, you didn't
even mention the Great Wall of China, and it's like
he probably didn't go there, or.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Like also sometimes you don't mention the things that are
just so friggin obvious.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Sure, he just didn't come up. We didn't think of it,
he didn't write it down. Rooster Cello didn't think it
was interesting. So Marco Pool gets a lot of credit
for like, oh, he you know, introduced the West to China,
or like he brought spaghetti back, which people think, like
there's a long standing urban legend that like when he
came back, he brought a lo Maine with him and
(33:48):
that became spaghetti. Like that's this is old, right, The
Silk Road has existed forever, Like none of this stuff
was None of the things that he brought back were
like the first time anybody had ever seen this thing.
His contribution to Western civilization is that he wrote like
the first like travel book on what's up in the
(34:10):
East right now, and people were like, dude, this is awesome,
I want to go there. And that inspired an entire
future generation of explorers, which became the Age of Discovery
of like, how can we build a boat that will
sail us there faster? How can we get here that
doesn't involve walking through sandstorms or like riding on a
(34:30):
camel through the Gobi desert.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
But this is how, this is how Europeans got their
like stuff together to go discover the.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Americas, right exactly like they they were kind of insulated in.
You know, a lot of the stuff that was written
in this time period is religious related, religious text things
like that. Right. You know, maybe maybe there were people
in Venice who wanted to go visit the Holy Land,
but you know, the realm of Kublai Khan was not
a Yuan dynasty. China was not a very high priority
on like the wish list for life travel, right, it
(34:59):
was on a lot of people's bucket lists to see
Zena until Marco Polo got back and was like, actually,
this is like the most awesome thing I've ever seen
in my entire life, and the way he wrote about
it and then he described it, and so yeah, so
he kind of blows everybody's mind with this, and like
it helps he provides some contribution for like some early cartography.
He brought maps back with him, which helped the Western
(35:20):
world kind of create maps. It's kind of how we
how we located where Japan is and some of the
some of the Southeast Asian islands that that Marco Polo
had visited, they weren't on any European maps. And there's
a lot of contribution that he provides to the West
that way. He also, like you know, one thing I
had talked about him not being like a super religious
(35:43):
kind of hardliner.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Yeah, he was open to other things.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Right, and so he recorded other things, right, Like I
think if if those Dominican monks had gone with him
and had the same adventure as him and come back,
they wouldn't have described the intricate details of the Buddhist religion, right,
or the culture or the language or the characters that
they use. They don't use alphabet, they use characters. Right,
there's all of these, you know, the kind of dress
(36:09):
they wore and the way they spoke, and they are
things that Marco Polo notes that maybe you were a
little bit more cultural and maybe wouldn't have been mentioned
by somebody who was like, oh this is all heresy, right,
or this is all idolatry or whatever. And so you know,
I think you should get some credit for that. And yeah,
(36:30):
his discoveries kind of helped to kind of spark not
just the Renaissance in Italy, but also this age of discovery,
age of exploration. All of these guys, the Vasco da
Gamas and the Columbuses and the Magellans, they've read Marco
Polo's book and we're like, you know, if not just
the lure of the amazingness of this realm and I
(36:52):
want to see it. But hey, there's probably some money
to be made here if we could get out there.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Right, Like also true, right, even.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
From a purely cynical point of view, like hey, right,
if I can get out there and trade trade for
some of this tea, like maybe I can make some money.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Right, yeah tea?
Speaker 1 (37:11):
And uh and yeah, so that was His contribution was
the book that he wrote that he didn't mean to write,
from adventures that he had that he didn't grow up
thinking he was going to have. He becomes this celebrity
across the Western world. He's rich and famous. He he's
forty five when he gets out of jail, and then
he finally, like he gets married for the first time.
(37:33):
He gets married. He has three daughters. He's wealthy, he's famous,
he's a powerful Venetian merchant. And yeah, and he lives
to be an old man. It never goes back to
China because I.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Think probably China is kind of a schlip.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
It's a bit of a hike for him. And also
there's a lot of people there that probably don't like him,
probably made some enemies. Well, we're going to be a
little jealous of him being good friends with Kublai Khan.
And yeah, he dies an old man in bed in
un of thirteen twenty four. His last words were, I
have not told half of what I have seen.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Marco.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
Marco, Yeah, I love him. He's just kind of this
everyman who goes on this busy adventure and then.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Very open minded every man, yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Which I think is awesome. Yeah, if you'd like to
read anymore about Marco Polo, I really encourage you to
read his book in English. It's called The Travels of
Marco Polo. It's very good and it gives you a
really good insight into the guy that I think he
might surprise you. It surprised me in a really good way,
so you know, he's very dry. He's a lot of
nuts and bolts and numbers and long descriptions of things
(38:41):
that you're like, get to the point, Marco. But it's
worth reading because it's his own words and he dictated
it himself, and it's only filtered through a few people
who were trying to make it marketable. I also really
enjoyed I read Marco Polo by Milton Rugoff, and there's
a book called Marco Polo From Venice to Xanaduba Lawrence Bergreen,
which are both worth checking out, if nothing else then
(39:04):
because they kind of fact check the Travels of Marco
Polo his autobiography. So you can check those out, and
I encourage you to do so if you want to
learn more about this guy. So anyway, that's our show
for today, and thank you so much for listening, and
we'll see you. We'll see you next week.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
Badass of the Week is an iHeart Radio podcast produced
by High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me,
Pat Larish, and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is
by me and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs,
Brandon Phibbs and Ali Lamer. Mixing and music and sound
design is by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special
(39:46):
thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart Badass of the Week
is based on the website Badass of Theweek dot com,
where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you
can email us at Badass podcast at badassoftheweek dot com.
(40:06):
If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell
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you get your podcasts.
The treasures of China and Southeast Asia are beyond anything
young Marco Polo could have imagined. Ivory palaces decorated with gold,
silver and jewels, huge sprawling fortresses that dwarf anything in Europe.
Wealth beyond his wildest dreams. Yet this strange new land
is also rife with danger. Murders, wild beasts, cannibals, pirates
(00:27):
and bandits roam the uncharted wilderness in search of prey.
And yet none of these apex predators are quite as
dangerous as the Mongol warriors with whom Marco Polo now
finds himself. They are ferocious in battle, as he has
seen many times. Yet to some of these Mongol generals,
there's a very thin line between a friend and enemy.
The rewards are great, the stakes high, the danger very real.
(00:52):
It will take cunning, wit, bravery, and a little bit
of luck if Marco Polo wishes to survive to tell
the tale of his adventure. Hello and welcome back to
Badass of the Week. My name is Ben Thompson. I'm
(01:12):
here with my co host doctor Pat Larish. And Pat
we are here to do part two of Marco Polo
and I just kind of wanted to see if maybe
we can get started by recapping kind of where we're
at at the end of part one.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, so we're calling this episode part two of Marco Polo,
but maybe it would be better to call last week's
episode like the prequel.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
It's true, we didn't actually talk about Marco very much
in part one, did we. No?
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I mean we spent time on his dad and his uncle,
And Okay, that's cool because they had adventures in their
own right and they're a badass in their own right.
And it's also setting up the scene for what's going
to happen in today's episode. And it's going to sound
kind of cliched and kind of tropy, but like, this
is the thing that happens in you know, young adult
fantasy novels. You've got this protagonist, this young protagonist whose
(02:02):
parents are absent for whatever reason. And okay, Marco Polo's
dad was not around for much of his formative years,
and then all of a sudden something happens. You know,
it's kind of like a cliche for fiction writing. You know,
a stranger comes to town. Who's the stranger, Well, it's
this guy and his brother who show up in Venice
and the docks of Venice, your.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Long last dad here for to think. But like, I
don't even know if this counts as being true because
it predates like Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter and all
of that. Maybe okay, they all got their ideas.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Quite possibly, quite possibly. Yeah, I mean you could argue
that there's some of this in the Odyssey sort of,
you know, a variation on it or whatever.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
But herded me.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Oh no, oh no, oh no. But but okay, But
the truth of the matter is, you know, given the
realities of travel, the realities of merchant roots, you know,
you can't just hop on a plane and be somewhere,
you know, at most twenty four hours later. You know,
you're like schlepping along on I don't know, like in
(03:02):
a caravan boom to boom to boom to boom, you know.
And what happens while you're gone, well, I don't know,
your kids grow up.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Yeah, And it's like, you know, it's the time period
where it's not that weird that you didn't see the
guy for fifteen years. You assume he's dead, but you're
not sure.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah dead or maybe kind of started a
new life elsewhere. But as it turns out, you know, okay,
we're in Venice, which you know is cool on its own, right,
but if you're a teenager, you might feel like you're
stuck there. And Marco Polo's here, he's in Venice. Boat
comes in his guys get off the boat. Something about
(03:41):
that one guy, Like, what is it like his face?
Is he like a doppelganger or something? Marco, I am
your father, except like in a non evil way.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
I guess, like Gandalf V and Darth Vader together. Sure?
Why not?
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah? Young Marco Polo, who is kind of full of
energy and looking for something to do, sees his dad
and his uncle and they say, would you like to
go on an adventure?
Speaker 1 (04:03):
And he says he says, hell yeah, And uh, let's
get into it. This is the story of what happened
to Marco Polo and why he's the name we remember
and not Nicolo Polo. So we're back and we are
(04:25):
talking about Marco Polo in China, his first meeting with
Kubla Khan. He is in Xanadu, which is, as we've mentioned,
is not always the roller skating disco movie, but it
is also the amazing like palace complex to the northwest
of Beijing, and Marco Polo's mind is blown. Right, He's
twenty one years old, and you got to remember he's
(04:47):
from Venice, which is probably the richest town in Europe
at the time that he is traveling here. Right, He's
from basically the New York City of Europe. He gets
here and he cannot fathom the size and scale and
opulence of the things that he's looking at. He says, attended,
you has sixteen miles of walls that go around several
(05:09):
palaces constructed entirely of marble. Kubla Khan appears to him
pulled on a chariot. There's like an amazing like throne
that's on this pedestal, like pulled by four elephants. He's
got a zoo with all these exotic animals in it.
He's got this huge like hunting ground where you can
hunt any kind of animal you want.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
I was gonna say, he said zoo, but oh please,
we called a menagerie.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah, menagerie that's a better way of phrasing it. Yeah,
Like he kuble E Khan is like there's deer in
this like hunting preserve on his property. And the way
that Kubla Khan hunts them is by bringing cheetahs out
on horseback and releasing them to go kill the deer
for him. That's like the level that we're talking about here.
(05:55):
Release the cheetah, release the cheetahs to catch the deer.
And that's how I I pointed the cheetah in the
correct direction, and therefore I am an amazing hunter. Yes,
And I mean Marco Polo has been watching the traders
come in and out of the biggest commercial hub in
Europe and he just cannot imagine what he's looking at.
(06:17):
He's like, what is this right? And Kublai Khan is
Kuba Khan is very different from the rest of the
Mongol kings and cons and stuff. He is a little
bit more cultured. He loves to hunt, he loves to fight.
That's a very Mongol thing. He likes both of those things.
But he also has kind of really adopted Chinese culture.
(06:38):
He's really kind of adopted like art and music and
kind of being cool with other religions and other people
and other ideas, and he kind of wants to accumulate.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
He's just like, hey, tell me about Christianity because I'm.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Curious, right, exactly right, Like, hey, you.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Guys are an a story in Christianity.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Sure, I mean, he's down with it. He doesn't care.
He's not Catholic, he's not in a story in christian
he is. He's Mongol religion leaning Buddhists, which is kind
of the dominant Chinese religion at this time. But he's curious.
He wants to know stuff. He's like, Okay, well, you
guys clearly have some money, You're dressed nice when you
show up. You're bringing cool stuff that I like, maybe
we can set up trade between our two peoples. Maybe
(07:18):
we can kind of grow and learn from each other.
And he presents himself as this kind of I mean,
for lack of a better word, renaissance man, because he
is going to kind of help usher in the Renaissance,
the capital r Renaissance in Europe. Him and Marco Polo
together are going to do that. But he is very
different from anybody that Marco Polo has met. And just
(07:42):
palace is on palaces, right, Like he's got his whatever,
fifteen wives or whatever, and each of them has a
palace that would rival any palace for any king in Europe.
And Marco Polo just cannot imagine the stuff when he's
looking at it, and he's got a little bit of
an inn with Kublai Khan because Kubla Khan already likes
uh Nicolo and Mafeo Polo.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
He's like, Hey, you're my guys who go on missions
for me.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yeah, and he's like, well you, you know you kind
of I wanted a hundred guys, and you brought me
one really good one, so maybe maybe that's worth it.
He brought the other stuff like, we're kind of we're
negotiating here. We're doing some prime directivy kind of stuff
where we're building bonds between our people without war. That's awesome,
and Marco Polo makes an impression on Kublai basically immediately.
(08:28):
Marco Polo is very interesting because he's not what you
would expect from like a European explorer traveling to the
Far East in the Middle Ages. He's on board with everything.
He's like, I like silk, this feels awesome. I'll wear it,
you know, I'll try your your food I've never had before,
like this, look this looks great. Yeah, but also the
spicest thing that nobody's had cuman before, turmeric or whatever
(08:50):
else goes into chatika masala. But yeah, so he's kind
of on board with everything, and he runs this very
interesting and very good like diplomatic line between being he's
cool and he's personal and he's friendly and he's nice,
and he gets along really well with koble I Khan,
and he doesn't like do the thing that a lot
of Europeans do at this time, which is like be
(09:12):
too hardcore about the religious thing, you know, like, yeah,
you got your religion, that's cool, you can do your thing.
I'm not going to tell you how to live your life,
and I'm not going to, like, I don't know, try
to chop your head off because you're Buddhist or whatever.
You know. Yeah, he dresses in the low clothes, he
learns the language. He kind of kind of integrates himself
into the society in a way that I think a
(09:34):
lot of Europeans wouldn't have at this time. And I
think that there are some things in his writing that
are a little bit problematic looking at it from twenty
twenty two, But for twelve seventy, this guy is like
he is along for the ride and he is kind
of going with it, and it's it's great, it's very refreshed.
I was very like happily surprised when I started reading
(09:57):
some of some of the stuff that he wrote about this.
It was definitely better than I was expecting. And he
just kind of integrates himself and becomes friends with the
con basically right away, as does right. He's funny and
he's smart. Yeah, but he's also smart enough to know
when to not piss off the Mongols, because that is
also an important thing that you need to kind of
(10:19):
manage when you are more or less a prisoner of
the con not.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
To self, do not piss off the Mongols when.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
You are at the Mongol hordes mercy. You should just
kind of try to swallow your pride every once in
a while, roll with it. And he's very good at it.
He's good at it, and he does a good job
of it. And he even more than Nicolo and Mafeo.
He kind of rises above them even and to become
a favorite of Kublai Khan. So for the next seventeen years,
(10:50):
Marco Pullo remains in China. He is an emissary. He's
a diplomatic emissary. He goes on diplomatic missions. He translates documents,
he does some trading stuff even like serves as the
Khan's representative like administrative representative over the city of yang
Zho for a while. He does whatever the Khan needs
him to do.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Okay, So he's so he's an outsider, he's a foreigner,
and he somehow manages to find a place in the
civil service.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Or yeah, and it works well for Kublai because Kublai
Khan is also an outsider. He's a Mongol administering over
Han Chinese. And so he relates to Marco Polo in
some way, like they find this common ground on like
we're both kind of running the show here, but neither
of us are from here, neither of us are we're
both kind of out of our depth, and there's a
(11:37):
lot of people here who wish we weren't here. So
there's a you know, there's you're able to kind of
find some common ground there. And Marco Polo starts going
on travels all over Asia. He goes to Japan, he
goes to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, he goes to some
of the islands, he goes to India. He's traveling all
over the place, and he sees all kinds of crazy stuff, right,
(11:59):
Ivory palaces, gold, silver jewels, fine silks. He's eating the
best foods and the spices he's getting all of like
the stuff that he's sharing dinner with the Khan. Right, diamonds,
I'm getting hungry. Yeah, It's like there's diamonds, and then
there's there's scars from Cashmir, there's Ivory. There's these huge
sprawling fortresses and cities and palaces all over all over
(12:23):
the empire that he is just amazed by, right, things
that you know, cities that dwarf anything that is known
to the Europeans at the time. Right, And like I
keep saying, he's from the one of the more cosmopolitan
areas of Europe. But when he gets to China, he's
just like, dude, you have no idea. Yeah, Venice is,
Venice is the share It's amazing. I was there last
(12:45):
summer and my mind was blown. But his mind was
blown just as hard.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Like Venice had its own empires.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Yeah, but yeah, yeah, it spanned most of the Adriatic, right,
like Golden Pagodas in Burma. And he goes to hang Zhou,
which has this huge lake in the middle of it.
That's beautiful. It's got millions of inhabitants, which is mind
blowing for him at the time. Right, Venice had one
main square and Hangzho has ten and each one of
them is a half mile by a half mile.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Oh wow.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
And it's like Kublei Khan. The way he describes it
and the way that he always referred to China was
that like the difference between China and Europe is that
Kublai Khan counts his money and his people and his
scale in the millions, which nobody in Europe was doing
at the time.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Right, yeah, he gets it. Marco Pol gets a nickname
later in his life, Marco Millions, because that's all he
talks about is how he million, Yeah EMILIONI yeah. Hell,
he talks about how Kublai measured things in millions, and
he talks about it so much, and he becomes a
name known as Marco millions.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Marko millions. That's it. That sounds like a rapper name.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
Oh for me, I was thinking, I was thinking mob guy. Okay, yeah,
Machael millions. He sees some dangerous stuff, right, he encounters
cannibals and Sumatra. He encounters bandits and pirates. There's a
group in me and mar that would kill travelers and
cut them up because they wanted to steal their souls.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Ooh, that's harsh.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
And Marco millions goes there on a mission from the
Cohn to tell them to stop doing that.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Okay, how does this go? Does Marco succeed in telling
them to stop cutting up people? Or does Marco himself
get cut up into pieces?
Speaker 1 (14:23):
They do not cut him up and turn him into pieces,
when presumably when you are the mouth of Kublai Khan,
you're prevented from that particular superstition.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Okay, that might give you some credit.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Yeah, yeah, So he sees unimaginable works of construction and
jungle like stuff that you don't have in Europe. Right,
even just going into a jungle, it'd be mind blowing
for a European.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Yeah, Like, if you're from Venice, there's like deeply cool
shit in Venice and you're just like, whoa.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
It's heavily forested, right, that's how they built the whole city.
They just sunk logs into the lagoon and built the
city on top of it.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
But that was like before and like the trees are
now substructure. Yeah, and then you're Marco Polo and you're like,
oh wow, I'm in the jungle.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
You're in a rainforest, which, like can you imagine being
dropped into Vietnam from like France? He's foreign science fiction, right. Yeah,
He's seeing all these animals he's never seen before, right,
Camel's horses. He rides on Camel's horses and elephants. Just
on his way to China. He rides Cammel's horses and elephants.
When he's there, he's seeing lions, tigers, elephants. He sees
(15:28):
what he calls unicorns, which we think are probably rhinos
one horn, big four legs, one horn. He doesn't, he
just mentions him in passing. It's like, yeah, if you
like unicorns, they got unicorns here. But we think he's
probably talking about rhinos.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Okay, okay, So he mentions these in past in passing.
So he sees a creature that he believes is a unicorn,
or he might be a unicorn, and that's not the
most important thing that he's talking.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
He was more focused on the dudes that were gonna
kill him and eat his soul than he was on
the rhinos fair.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Point, fair point, Okay, like, oh wow, mythical creature, dude,
you no, no, no, don't.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Kill He sees he sees guys off the coast of
Singapore that are called shark charmers that like keep the
sharks away from the fisherman. He hunts. He hunts wolves.
He uses eagles to hunt wolves, and he uses cheetahs
to hunt deer.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Well, he uses eagles.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
That's like a Mongol thing, totally a Mongol thing, right,
the Mongols love to fight and hunt, and Kubla Khun.
No matter how cultured he is, how advanced he is
among the Mongol people, he has still got that Mongol
heart and he likes to kill things and he hunts.
Yeah yeah, the golden eagles that like kill wolves.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
But yeah, but like the thing about the like hunting
with eagles, that's a thing even to today.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Yeah yeah, yeah, So he goes and does that. He
does the cheetah hunting thing, which I don't think is
a deal anymore. I don't think they have cheetahs in
Asia anymore. But I mean it's animal planet stuff, right,
it's but it's also a science fiction is like a
D and D adventure, right, where he's seeing all these
crazy monsters and man eating creatures. He's in sumatrass tigers right,
Like they don't have any of the stuff where he
came from. Yeah, and it's blowing his mind. But he's
(17:09):
he's doing this and then he gets he works his
way up. I mean seventeen years a long time. He's
doing all of these things. While he's there, he eventually
gets promoted up to you know, as the Mongols are.
When you get promoted high enough, you suddenly start taking
on military details, right as one does. Right. So he
starts marching with the Mongol army on missions to like
quell bandits, or expand the empire, or do various Mongol
(17:33):
related things. So he is marching at the head of
an army of two hundred thousand mounted Mongols. And I
want to put this in perspective.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Yeah, the two hundred thousand mounted Mongols. So this is
two hundred thousand human beings on two hundred thousand horses.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
They usually would carry three horses. So this is the
point I want to make, And this is the point
that I think is very important when understanding Marco Polo
that we need to talk about, which is the scale
of what he is experienced is not on the level
of anything anybody in Europe could comprehend. So let's look
for reference. Let's look at the big battle that created
(18:11):
England as we know it today. Right, the Battle of
Hastings ten sixty six. It's two hudred years before this,
but time progresses. Everybody's still riding on horseback and shooting
bow and arrows and fighting with swords. Right, it's two
undred years but like, not a lot has changed. Technologically,
Willing the conqueror had a stirrups, but that's you know,
that was like the technological advancement over the Romans. And
so Battle of Hastings Wood the conqueror goes and he fights,
(18:33):
and he defeats the he defeats the Saxons, and he
takes over England. We don't know for sure, but best
estimate twenty thousand soldiers total among both sides combined. Marco
Polo is riding at the head of an army that
is ten times the size of that entire battlefield. Wow,
it's something that we need to think about while we
talk about him, because, you know, one thing that is
(18:56):
kind of a challenge when talking about Marco polo. Is
that Like we've seen pictures of all this stuff that
he's talking about, and we've you can go to a
zoo and see our rhino now. And two hundred and
fifty thousand guys is smaller than the current US army,
but compared to what was going on in Europe twelve hundred,
this is out of control.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Yeah. And also just in like actual human terms, like
as a human being on the ground, how big is
two hundred thousand?
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Do you imagine the sound of two hundred thousand horses
riding by you? Like, yeah, we'll take an hour for
them to all ride past you, right, maybe longer?
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Yeah, And how does an actual human being conceptualize two
hundred thousand? Like if one goes to a football stadium.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Depends on the stadium, but you're looking at sixty maybe yeah,
three football stadiums or the people, and that would be
like NFL stadiums, not like the high school football stadiums
unless you're in Texas.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Right, Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Marco's there for some pretty big battles. So he's going
into I mean, he travels everywhere, right, So he's going
through jungle, He's passing through ancient ruins, of old like
Kimer and old Viet like ruins in the jungle. Right, Yeah,
he's going through the Gobi desert going there's old ruins,
there's current stuff. He's fighting in the desert, he's fighting
(20:17):
in the jungle. He's traveling everywhere. Over these seventeen years,
he gets sent everywhere that he can possibly go, and
he's leading these armies, and he starts to get a
little bit disillusioned by what's going on. So he likes
all of this opulence and the spices. He loves the like,
he loves the food, he loves the language, he loves
(20:37):
the culture, he loves the dress and all of this stuff.
He doesn't love the slaughtering of the women and children.
He doesn't love the like launching catapults at buildings and
killing people and beheading all of the surviving men and
the real like nitty gritty Mongols stuff that the Mongols
are still doing at this time period. This kind of like,
(20:59):
like I said, Kubla likes to hunt and he likes
to fight, and he likes to wage war and he
likes to you know, subject his enemies to his wrath.
But from Marc and Polo, this doesn't fit the idea
of google icon that he had of this kind of
cultured renaissance man. When he's standing on this field watching
the Mongol army like behead prisoners of war and women
(21:20):
and children, he he doesn't like it, and he's like, oh,
maybe he actually this guy is not as awesome as
I thought he was. Yeah, And he starts to get
a little bit sad once he gets into this level
of power where he's marching with the army, Like it
was really fun when we all dressed up and march
in a parade, but it's it's less fun now that
I'm standing on this blood soaked sand with a streaming
(21:44):
for their families made.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Yeah, no, I say so, I say, he gets to
see the sasage being made. But it's like no, it's
like he gets to see humans being decapitated.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
The sage being made. It's like a great example, right,
like that's how these people are being treated, right like
this is this is that's how like these Mongol lieutenants
dealt with their prisoners. Right. Yeah, it's brutal and it's
awful and it's you know, it's one thing to be
like the you know, drive your enemies before you hear
the lamentations of their women. But it's a very different
thing to I mean, that's a Ganghis con quote. I
(22:15):
should stipulate that.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Yeah, you know, to actually hear the lamentations.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
It's very different to be standing there watching that happen,
you know, Yeah, because it takes hours, you know, when
it's not.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Like okay, it takes hours. And also it's like horrific.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Right exactly, you're just standing there watching like a horror
movie for hours, right, like ye brutal, brutal stuff. And
he did not like it. He was not a fan
of this, so that starts a disillusion. And the other
thing that he's thinking at this point is that like
he's been there seventeen years, Kublai Khan he was, he's
he was twenty one when he got there, but Kubla
Khan was older. Kubla Khan's old now, right, Kuble Khan
(22:49):
doesn't have much longer to live. And you know, when
you're eco polo and you work your way in close
with the Khan of the Mongol Horde, you don't do
that without making a few enemies. He's in court who
are also Mongol warriors who may succeed Kublai Khan is
the Khan, and Marco, Polo and Nicolo and Mafeo, his
(23:10):
dad and his uncle were like, we got to get
out of here before Koubli dies, because when Kubli dies,
we're done for right, Like we're going to be on
the first wave of purges for whoever replaces him. So
we got to go. So they go to Kublai and like,
we got to go, and Kublai is like, no, you're
too valuable, you can't leave. Oh, So they have to
ask him like five or six times. It takes them
(23:31):
a couple years before he finally lets them go. So
he does eventually let them go. In twelve ninety one,
he gives them the mission to escort his daughter, the
Princess Cocochin. She's going to go to Persia to seal
a marriage alliance with the Ilkanate. So it's not Hulagu
Khan anymore, but it's that part of the that section
(23:53):
of the of the Horde. So this is probably incestuous
in some way to some degree, but Kublai Khan's daughter
is going to go marry Hulagu Khan's nephew or whatever,
you know, but.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Maybe this is like this is like baseline.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah, it's not full Valirian, but it's it's a little Habsburgian.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
I guess, yeah, yeah, And I guess like this is
just sort of what happens among royal houses.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Yeah, that's how you get That's how you get resputant.
You get everybody having hemophilia, and that's how you end
up with resputing. Okay, So they are going to go
by sea, which is a kind of a new thing
for Marco Polo. He's sailed to a bunch of the
islands and stuff, but this is the farthest he's going
to have traveled by sea.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
So we're in the thirteenth century, and so sea routs
from China maybe not completely established.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Or no lots of pirates happening here. It's dangerous. He's
traveling with the princess of the Bungo Empire, so he's
he's not too worried about it. He's got a pretty
big bodyguard on turage around him.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Okay, good for him.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
And so they go to Singapore, they go to Sumatra,
they go to India, and then from India they go
by land through Persia, drop off the Princess No problems
continue on towards the Black Sea and eventually decide they're
going to sell for home. They don't want to go
back because there's too many enemies for them in China.
And after twenty four years and maybe somewhere between fifteen
(25:27):
and twenty thousand miles, Oh wow, Marco Polo finally returns
to Venice.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
And what's Venice like when he is back?
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Like Venice is he returns home to Venice, and he
didn't have much there, right, he had his uncle and
his aunt and raised him, but like he didn't have
much to go home too. He didn't have like a
wife and kids or anything like that there. He goes
back and Venice is at war with the Italian city
of Genoa. You have all these Italian city states at
the time, so Genoa and Venice are at war. So
(25:57):
Marco Polo is like, well, okay, I'll fight to defend Venice.
He he comes back, he's incredibly wealthy. He's got all
of these treasures and all these things he brought back
from China with him, but he also has feels this
responsibility to his hometown against the Genuines, and he he
feels loyalty to Venice, so he goes to fight for them.
He buys a boat, and he buys a tribute, and
he puts the tribute on his boat, and he goes
(26:19):
to fight the ticket.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
He has a boat, and he puts the treb on
the boat.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yes, that's awesome, yeah yeah, and he commands it and
he hires a crew and he commands it in battle
for Venice against Genoa. And uh, he's defeated. Yes, he
is in on a boat with the tribute on a boat.
He is defeated somewhere off the coast of of of Turkey,
(26:46):
possibly at the Battle of Curzola, which is a huge
battle that happened around this time period. Venice was this
up and coming like very powerful trade empire. Genoa was
arguing with them. There was a huge battle that took
place around this time and something like one hundred Venetian
galleys on one side, eighty genomen on the other. Huge losses,
(27:09):
huge destruction, lots of death, nothing like he'd seen with
the Mongols, but lots of death and destruction and dying.
And Marco Polo and the Venetians are crushed, right, And
there was a chance that this type might break the
Venetian Republic. They recover, but this was really really dark
moment for Venice's history. So Marco Polo is defeated. He surrenders,
his ship is bashed up, a lot of his crew
(27:31):
are dead, the Venetian fleet is mostly destroyed. He is
put in shackles and his ship is towed from the
waters off the coast of Adana, Turkey, to Genoa, and
he is imprisoned in a tower in Genoa overlooking the
sea there. And he is kind of just thrown into
this tower and locked up.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Oh no, so our boys in the slammer.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
He's in the slammer for just like for forty years.
He's imprisoned for four years by the Genuines. His cellmate
is another person who had been captured by the Genoans.
His cellmate in the tower is a dude named Rusticello,
which I don't know if the ch is a hard
ch or a soft cich Rusta Kello to Pisa. He
(28:18):
was a dude from Pisa who the Genoins had overtaken
that and they took this guy and they imprisoned him
in the tower. Roosta Kello Pisa is the first Italian
person to write about King Arthur and the Knights of
the Round Table in Italy. He was a famous author
who had written King Arthur's stories for the people of Italy.
(28:38):
He wrote in French, and he wrote an Italian. He
was a best selling author who had been kind of
imprisoned and thrown in this tower. And he is Marco
Polo's cellmate. And here is a thing that is one
hundred percent worth mentioning when talking about Marco Polo is
that he had no intention of telling anybody about what
he had done in China until he was locked in
(29:00):
a tower with this best selling fiction writer for four years.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
So it's like if like in some like alternate timeline,
I go out and have adventures and then somehow I
wind up being locked in a cell with like Stephen
King or something.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
Right, and you have nothing to do except talk about
your lives. Yeah, Marco Polo is just like, well, yeah,
I was in China for a while, and Rista Kello's like, okay,
what'd you do there? Get to pen and then over
the course of this four years they write Marco Polo's memoirs,
which he had no intention of doing, which I love
and I feel like I cannot stress enough. But he
(29:37):
had no plans to write any of this down, or at.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Least that's what he said, right, that's the stick that
he's that's the persona that he's.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
I don't know, I believe it's accurate because when you
read this stuff that he wrote, he is a business guy,
he's a finance It's very clear that he was very
personable in real life. But when he the way he
thinks about things like then this had it had twelve gates,
and it had forty seven bridges, and then we ate
this and it was made out of this. It had
(30:07):
this much weight of marble on it, and bapa ba.
He's just like he's a bean counter. Yeah, and he
talks like he writes like a bean counter. But Rustacello
is like, I think I can spice this up a
little bit.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Spice yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
And over the course of four years they write this,
this story of Marco Polo's adventures in China, and in
twelve ninety nine the war between Genoa and Venice ends
and they're released and they go to publish it, and
Marco Polo wants to call it called the book Description
of the World, which is a very Marco Polo thing
(30:44):
that he would want to do, that's what he would
want to call it. Rustacello decides he wants to call
it the Great Book of Marvels of the World. Right.
The Italians know it as The Millions a Million, Yeah,
because that's that was Marco's nickname later on in life,
and that's what they call the book, is the Millions.
In English, we just call it the Travels of Marco Polo.
(31:04):
But whatever the names, this blew everyone's minds. And it's
what you said. It is written an illuminated manuscript by
a professional, by a best selling romance author. This is
the movie adaptation of Marco Polo's life, written like with
with the author's help by a dude who is like
good at this stuff, right, and so when it comes out,
(31:27):
between the animal stuff and the travels and all that,
like everything that comes out, this is like reading a
sci fi story, right, It's like reading it's like reading
Gulliver's Travels right for the later generation, right, like like
what this does? No way this exists in real life.
And that's one thing I love about it. Everybody on
the time period was like this bullshit, all of shit, right,
(31:48):
Like there's no way this happened.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Like this is comic book.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
No way, you're totally lying fantasy, right, And even today
when we can Google image for some of this stuff,
like there's there's people who are like, no, you was
lying because it's said that like that Xanadua had twenty
seven gates, but we know from the schematics that I
actually had twenty five, So he's totally exaggerating. He probably
didn't even go there. And it's like, Okay, look, he
(32:13):
is writing about things that he remembered from seventeen years before,
and it's being filtered through another dude, a best selling
fiction novelist.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
And the original manuscript of this was written in a
language called Franco Venetian, which was then translated into all
these other languages, and things got lost in translation, and
also the other translators interpreted their own stuff. Their entire
passages appear in various translations of this book that don't
appear in the original. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
And honestly, going specifically, I feel like, do that have
twenty five gates or twenty seven gates? When you're talking
about manuscripts, numbers are like the most likely to get
messed up because they're just so arbitrary.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
You know, I don't remember how old I am like
half the.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
Time, same, same, Yeah, I'm definitely not going to like
if you ask me how many windows there are in
the front of my house, I don't think I could
tell you accurately.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
You know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Yeah, And Marco Polo like is right about a lot
of this stuff because he does remember these things because
he is a bean counter. So he is right about
a lot of this stuff. But like, like, you didn't
even mention the Great Wall of China, and it's like
he probably didn't go there, or.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Like also sometimes you don't mention the things that are
just so friggin obvious.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Sure, he just didn't come up. We didn't think of it,
he didn't write it down. Rooster Cello didn't think it
was interesting. So Marco Pool gets a lot of credit
for like, oh, he you know, introduced the West to China,
or like he brought spaghetti back, which people think, like
there's a long standing urban legend that like when he
came back, he brought a lo Maine with him and
(33:48):
that became spaghetti. Like that's this is old, right, The
Silk Road has existed forever, Like none of this stuff
was None of the things that he brought back were
like the first time anybody had ever seen this thing.
His contribution to Western civilization is that he wrote like
the first like travel book on what's up in the
(34:10):
East right now, and people were like, dude, this is awesome,
I want to go there. And that inspired an entire
future generation of explorers, which became the Age of Discovery
of like, how can we build a boat that will
sail us there faster? How can we get here that
doesn't involve walking through sandstorms or like riding on a
(34:30):
camel through the Gobi desert.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
But this is how, this is how Europeans got their
like stuff together to go discover the.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Americas, right exactly like they they were kind of insulated in.
You know, a lot of the stuff that was written
in this time period is religious related, religious text things
like that. Right. You know, maybe maybe there were people
in Venice who wanted to go visit the Holy Land,
but you know, the realm of Kublai Khan was not
a Yuan dynasty. China was not a very high priority
on like the wish list for life travel, right, it
(34:59):
was on a lot of people's bucket lists to see
Zena until Marco Polo got back and was like, actually,
this is like the most awesome thing I've ever seen
in my entire life, and the way he wrote about
it and then he described it, and so yeah, so
he kind of blows everybody's mind with this, and like
it helps he provides some contribution for like some early cartography.
He brought maps back with him, which helped the Western
(35:20):
world kind of create maps. It's kind of how we
how we located where Japan is and some of the
some of the Southeast Asian islands that that Marco Polo
had visited, they weren't on any European maps. And there's
a lot of contribution that he provides to the West
that way. He also, like you know, one thing I
had talked about him not being like a super religious
(35:43):
kind of hardliner.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Yeah, he was open to other things.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Right, and so he recorded other things, right, Like I
think if if those Dominican monks had gone with him
and had the same adventure as him and come back,
they wouldn't have described the intricate details of the Buddhist religion, right,
or the culture or the language or the characters that
they use. They don't use alphabet, they use characters. Right,
there's all of these, you know, the kind of dress
(36:09):
they wore and the way they spoke, and they are
things that Marco Polo notes that maybe you were a
little bit more cultural and maybe wouldn't have been mentioned
by somebody who was like, oh this is all heresy, right,
or this is all idolatry or whatever. And so you know,
I think you should get some credit for that. And yeah,
(36:30):
his discoveries kind of helped to kind of spark not
just the Renaissance in Italy, but also this age of discovery,
age of exploration. All of these guys, the Vasco da
Gamas and the Columbuses and the Magellans, they've read Marco
Polo's book and we're like, you know, if not just
the lure of the amazingness of this realm and I
(36:52):
want to see it. But hey, there's probably some money
to be made here if we could get out there.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Right, Like also true, right, even.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
From a purely cynical point of view, like hey, right,
if I can get out there and trade trade for
some of this tea, like maybe I can make some money.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Right, yeah tea?
Speaker 1 (37:11):
And uh and yeah, so that was His contribution was
the book that he wrote that he didn't mean to write,
from adventures that he had that he didn't grow up
thinking he was going to have. He becomes this celebrity
across the Western world. He's rich and famous. He he's
forty five when he gets out of jail, and then
he finally, like he gets married for the first time.
(37:33):
He gets married. He has three daughters. He's wealthy, he's famous,
he's a powerful Venetian merchant. And yeah, and he lives
to be an old man. It never goes back to
China because I.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Think probably China is kind of a schlip.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
It's a bit of a hike for him. And also
there's a lot of people there that probably don't like him,
probably made some enemies. Well, we're going to be a
little jealous of him being good friends with Kublai Khan.
And yeah, he dies an old man in bed in
un of thirteen twenty four. His last words were, I
have not told half of what I have seen.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Marco.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
Marco, Yeah, I love him. He's just kind of this
everyman who goes on this busy adventure and then.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Very open minded every man, yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Which I think is awesome. Yeah, if you'd like to
read anymore about Marco Polo, I really encourage you to
read his book in English. It's called The Travels of
Marco Polo. It's very good and it gives you a
really good insight into the guy that I think he
might surprise you. It surprised me in a really good way,
so you know, he's very dry. He's a lot of
nuts and bolts and numbers and long descriptions of things
(38:41):
that you're like, get to the point, Marco. But it's
worth reading because it's his own words and he dictated
it himself, and it's only filtered through a few people
who were trying to make it marketable. I also really
enjoyed I read Marco Polo by Milton Rugoff, and there's
a book called Marco Polo From Venice to Xanaduba Lawrence Bergreen,
which are both worth checking out, if nothing else then
(39:04):
because they kind of fact check the Travels of Marco
Polo his autobiography. So you can check those out, and
I encourage you to do so if you want to
learn more about this guy. So anyway, that's our show
for today, and thank you so much for listening, and
we'll see you. We'll see you next week.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
Badass of the Week is an iHeart Radio podcast produced
by High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me,
Pat Larish, and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is
by me and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs,
Brandon Phibbs and Ali Lamer. Mixing and music and sound
design is by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special
(39:46):
thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart Badass of the Week
is based on the website Badass of Theweek dot com,
where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you
can email us at Badass podcast at badassoftheweek dot com.
(40:06):
If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell
your friends and your enemies if you want as. We'll
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