Marco Polo

He was born in 1254 in Venice. He was the most famous European medieval explorer and Venetian merchant, one of the greatest adventurers in history. In 1271, he set out with his father and uncle for the Far East, as one of the first Western Europeans to travel the Silk Road to China, where he spent seventeen years before returning to Venice. While living in China, he was in the service of Kublai Khan (grandson of Genghis Khan and the last great khan of the Mongol Empire and founder and first emperor of the Chinese Yuan dynasty; then ruler of Mongolia and China), at whose court he became rich and where he kept diaries writing about the things he saw. He toured many countries of the Far East, all the way to present-day Myanmar and Vietnam. After 24 years and 30,000 kilometers, the Poles returned to Venice in 1295. Marco Polo's experiences, recorded in the Book of World Wonders, encouraged sailors from European countries to search for sea routes to the Far East. Based on his stories, geographical maps of eastern countries were made, which at that time were almost completely unknown to Europeans.

source: google

Arriving in Venice, Marco Polo's adventures did not end. A few months after his return, a war broke out between Venice and Genoa, in which he participated as the captain of a warship. During a naval battle, at the end of 1298, he was captured and taken to the prison where he was until the summer of 1299. In prison, he met the writer Rusticel from Pisa, to whom he told in detail his experiences on travels in Asia. This is how the famous book Books of World Wonders was created, later known as The Million (Il Milione) and The Voyages of Marco Polo. For the first time, that book was written about coal, banknotes, carpets made of silk and gold from China, Indian spices, gunpowder and many unusual things that were not known in Europe. The book was immediately a huge success, although a large number of medieval readers considered it an extravagant romance rather than a true narrative. Many considered him a fraud.

Marco Paul is considered by many to be one of the world's greatest researchers, while skeptics call him the world's greatest narrator. Most historians believe that he reached China, but there are also those who claim that he did not actually get that far, but that he only retold the information he heard from others. When he was asked on his deathbed if everything he talked about in his book was true, Marco Polo reportedly replied that he had not written even half of what he saw. He died on January 8, 1324 in Venice.