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In the year 1295 A. D. , after an absence of twenty-four years, Maffeo, Nicole, and Marco Polo returned to their hometown of Venice, Italy. The Polo trio looked like strangers to their fellow citizens: they wore bizarre and ragged clothes and spoke in an accented tongue. It is said that their own family neither recognized nor acknowledged them due to their foreign appearance. Marco, having left Venice as a young man of 17, was now 41 years old. He had spent most of his life traveling in Asia.
Having spent so much of his life in the Orient, Marco must have experienced an extreme culture shock upon returning to his homeland. While in Asia during the voyages to and from China, Marco Polo saw vast numbers of different lands and lifestyles. His Venetian upbringing gave him a unique perspective on Asian civilization. A few years after his return to Venice in 1295, Marco found himself aboard a Venetian ship under the post of gentleman-commander during a regional war between Venice and Genoa. The ship was captured by the Genoese fleet and Marco consequently spent the next few years, until May of 1299, in a Genoa prison.
It was during this period that Marco found the time to dictate, possibly with the help of notes taken during his voyage, the story of his years abroad. Rustigielo, a citizen of Pisa and fellow prisoner of Marco, took down Marco's story. The book was dictated in prison and copied by hand, as the technology of mass printing had not yet immigrated to Europe from China. As a consequence, there exist today many versions, translations, and reconstructions of the Rustigielo transcript. Polo's book, entitled The Description of the World, covers the area from Constantinople to Japan to Siberia to Africa. Because these locations are told in the third-person, the exact route of Marco Polo is not known.
Instead of narrating the journey of the Polos, the book contains historical observations and detailed descriptions of cultures and geography. For this reason Marco Polo's accounts can be used to re-examine the history of China. Details that the young Polo observed included regional histories, descriptions of cities, architecture, inhabitants, races, languages and governments. Also described are peoples' different lifestyles, diets, style of dress, marriage customs, rituals, and religions. There are further accounts of the trading practices, crafts, manufactured products, plants, animals, minerals, and terrain. Such a diverse and detailed account of the lands that he journeyed earned Polo the name 'the father of modern anthropology. ' At first, the places that Polo's book tells of were too strange for the Western mind to accept.
Crocodiles and coconuts had never been seen before by most Europeans, and were more easily ascribed to the product of one Venetian's overactive imagination than taken as fact. Yet more so than this, that the ethnocentric European mind refused to entertain the notion that a civilization larger and more advanced than its own existed seems the most likely reason for the rejection of Polo's story. Europe had come to think of itself as the center of civilization, and this belief was difficult to change. In addition to observations of exotic wildlife, descriptions of the technological advancements of Chinese civilization, such as the use of paper currency, were staunchly rejected. Far from being hailed as a daring adventurer and enlightening explorer, the phrase 'It's a Marco Polo' came to denote an exaggerated tale. Fearing for his historical reputation, friends of Marco Polo even asked him to recant his story on his deathbed in 1323.
Polo refused, reportedly saying, 'I have not written down the half of those things which I saw. ' Indeed, several wonders of Chinese civilization, such as the Great Wall, are not mentioned in Polo's book. He either forgot to include things in his book, or knowingly omitted them, thinking that they would not be believed. Polo's book offered many geographic contributions concerning the layout of the land of Asia. However, it took more than one hundred years for Marco Polo's book to be accepted not as a work of fiction, but as fact. It was not until the nineteenth century that his itineraries were corroborated in detail. This eventual verification was made possible by further explorations into Asia.
Marco Polo's story also came to encourage further exploration of the world: a well-read edition of Marco Polo's book was taken by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage to the New World.
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