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Marco Polo

Duration:
43 minutes
First broadcast:
Thursday 24 May 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the celebrated Venetian explorer Marco Polo. In 1271 Polo set off on an epic journey through Asia. He was away for more than twenty years, and when he returned to Venice he told extraordinary tales of his adventures. He had visited the court of the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, and acted as his emissary, travelling through many of the remote territories of the Far East. An account of Marco Polo's travels was written down by his contemporary Rustichello da Pisa, a romance writer he met after being imprisoned during a war against the neighbouring Genoese.

The Travels of Marco Polo was one of the most popular books produced in the age before printing. It was widely translated, and many beautifully illustrated editions made their way to the collections of the rich and educated. It was much read by later travellers, and Polo's devotees included Christopher Columbus and Henry the Navigator. For centuries it was seen as the first and best account of life in the mysterious East; but today the accuracy and even truth of Marco Polo's work is often disputed.

With:

Frances Wood
Lead Curator of Chinese Collections at the British Library

Joan Pau Rubies
Reader in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science

Debra Higgs Strickland
Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Glasgow

Producer: Thomas Morris.

  • FURTHER READING

    Mary Campbell, ‘The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600’ (Cornell University Press, 1991)

    Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare A. Iannucci (ed.), ‘Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West’ (University of Toronto Press, 2008)

    Herbert Franke, ‘China Under Mongol Rule’ (Variorum, 1994)

    Peter Jackson, ‘The Mission of William of Rubruck’ (Hackett Pub Co, 2009)

    John Larner, ‘Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World’ (Yale University Press, 1999)

    Leonardo Olschki, ‘Guillaume Boucher: A French Artist at the Court of the Khans’ (Johns Hopkins Press, 1946)

    Leonardo Olschki, ‘Marco Polo’s Asia’ (University of California Press, 1960)

    Igor de Rachewiltz, ‘Papal Envoys to the Great Khans’ (Faber and Faber, 1971)

    Frances Wood, ‘Did Marco Polo Go To China?’ (Westview Press, 1998)

    Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes 1250-1625’ (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

    Joan-Pau Rubiés (ed.), ‘Medieval Ethnographies: European Perceptions of the World Beyond’ (Ashgate, 2009)

    Colonel Sir Henry Yule, ‘The Travels of Marco Polo: The Complete Yule-Cordier Edition’ (Dover Publications, 1993)

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