Polo, Marco

Marco (1250-1324), a celebrated Italian traveller. The elder Polo was a wealthy nobleman of Venice. He took Marco with him on a trading expedition to the eastward of the Caspian Sea. The entire region from the Caspian to the Pacific was ruled at this time by the Great Khan. His representatives urged the advisability of an acquaintance with the wealthy regions of China to the eastward, the outcome of the matter being that young Marco traveled eastward and entered finally the service of the khan. In his travels he traversed Central Asia and the desert of Gobi. He had opportunity to see Pekin and other Chinese cities. He was at one time sent back to Europe to request from the pope that one hundred missionaries and men of learning he sent to China to educate the people in the learning of the West. His mission was not successful. When he finally left the service of the khan, he returned homeward by way of India and Abyssinia. He had been absent from Venice for a quarter of a century. He appears to have been fond of telling his experience, but he had no liking for pen and ink. During one of the petty wars for which the city republics of Italy were noted, he was thrown into the prison of Genoa. He improved the interval by dictating his experiences to a French fellow prisoner who wrote them out in detail.

Polo was not only the first European traveler to trace a route across Central Asia, but the first to describe Pekin, the new capital of China. Through Marco Polo the Europeans obtained their first trustworthy knowledge of the Chinese, their dress, customs, and religion, as well as the first knowledge of Tibet, Burma, Siam, Cochin China, Japan, Java, and Sumatra. His accounts of temples, shaved heads, naked savages, dog sledges, white bears, reindeer sledges, and other countless marvels of Asia were a revelation to Europeans. As this account appeared before the invention of printing it was multiplied in manuscript and passed from hand to hand. The fortunate possessor of a copy was sure of an audience. Some eighty of the manuscripts, differing somewhat in text, are still in existence. His accounts of the enormous wealth of the East, of temples glittering with gold and jewels, stimulated the trade with the East tremendously, and had an important influence eventually on the discovery of the New World. Little is known of Polo's private life. The exact date of his death is uncertain. He was buried in the family sarcophagus in the church of St. Lorenzo, Venice, but in a renovation of the church this appears to have been removed and lost.

See Mandeville

Polybius (204-125 B. C.), a celebrated historian. He was born in Arcadia, Greece. He was an officer of the Achaean League but was taken prisoner to Rome about 169 B.C., where he became a friend of the younger Scipio. He was converted to a belief in the destiny of Rome and endeavored to reconcile his countrymen to wear the Roman yoke. As a Greek of influence, a convert to Roman institutions, he had the confidence of Roman statesmen and had access to such historical materials as the wealth and intelligence of Rome could provide. He wrote a history of Rome in forty books, five of which, with fragments of others, are still extant. It was his purpose, as he him self tells us, to set forth for the instruction of future generations, "how and why it was that all the known regions of the civilized world had fallen under the sway of Rome." "Who," he continues, "is so poor spirited or indolent as not to wish to know by what means and thanks to what sort of constitution the Romans subdued the world in something less than fifty-three years." The portions of his work preserved from destruction sketch the early history of Rome and the Punic Wars. Even the fragments are of value to the historian. Polybius relates, for instance, that in northern Italy wheat was worth about six cents per bushel, and that board in an inn cost two-thirds of a cent per day. At the same time wheat was worth about seventy cents in Rome. See Xenophon; Thucydides