Books with title The Travels of Marco Polo the Venetian

Marco Polo’s account of his journey throughout the East in the thirteenth century was one of the earliest European travel narratives, and it remains the most important. The merchant-traveler from Venice, the first to cross the entire continent of Asia, provided us with accurate descriptions of life in China, Tibet, India, and a hundred other lands, and recorded customs, natural history, strange sights, historical legends, and much more. From the dazzling courts of Kublai Khan to the perilous deserts of Persia, no book contains a richer magazine of marvels than the Travels.This edition, selected and edited by the great scholar Manuel Komroff, also features the classic and stylistically brilliant Marsden translation, revised and corrected, as well as Komroff’s Introduction to the 1926 edition.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

1948 copyright, translated and edited by William Marsden, re-edited by Thomas Write and illustrated by Jon Corbino; published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., in Garden City, New York. This is the Literary Guild Edition which was the Doubleday Book Club at the time. Jon Corbino's art in itself is sought after, and using the inserted illustrations could be quite inspirational for wall art, collage work and paper ephemera. Fascinating eyewitness look into the world of the late 1200's. Admittedly it is told with some Western bias and some Christian bias (He lumps Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, etc., together, simply declaring them 'idol-worshipers'). His strongest bias was toward his host and employer in China, 'The Grand Khan', who ruled China by the sword and employed foreigners to keep order because he could not trust the natives. Marco describes the marvels of the Chinese civilization, but is not always appreciative of the richness of its culture. In some way's that is part of the book's charm. The majority of the book is a description of places he visited, but occasionally he gets into depth regarding people stories and in a few cases he touches on local folklore. That is where the book gets most fascinating. Polo kept himself largely out of his narrative, preferring to play the role of observer and objective reporter. William Marsden translation, which was completed in 1818. It captures a sense of antiquity.

The following is from the books prologue: Emperors, kings, dukes, marquises, earls, and knights, and all other people desirous of knowing the diversities of the races of mankind, as well as the diversities of kingdoms, provinces, and regions of all parts of the East, read through this book, and ye shall find in it the greatest and most marvelous characteristics of the peoples especially of Armenia, Persia, India, and Tartary, as they are severally related in the present work by Marco Polo, a wise and learned citizen of Venice distinctly what things he saw and what he heard from others. Wishing in his secret thoughts that the things he had seen and heard should be made public by the present work, for the benefit of those who could not see them with their own eyes, he himself being in the year our Lord 1295 in prison in Genoa, caused the things which are contained in the present work to be written by master Rustigielo, a citizen of Pisa, who was with him in the same prison at Genoa; and he divided it into three parts. Book One of Armenia, Persia, India and Tartary. Book Two of Kublai-Kaan, Cathay, Manji and Thebet. Book Three of Lesser, Middle and Greater India, The Region of Darkness, the Province of Russia and Great Turkey.

Marco Polo (1254-1329) has achieved an almost archetypal status as a traveller, and his Travels is one of the first great travel books of Western literature, outside the ancient world. The Travels recounts Polo's journey to the eastern court of Kublai Khan, the chieftain of the Mongol empire which covered the Asian continent, but which was almost unknown to Polo's contemporaries. Encompassing a twenty-four year period from 1721, Polo's account details his travels in the service of the empire, from Beijing to northern India and ends with the remarkable story of Polo's return voyage from the Chinese port of Amoy to the Persian Gulf. Alternately factual and fantastic, Polo's prose at once reveals the medieval imagination's limits, and captures the wonder of subsequent travel writers when faced with the unfamiliar, the exotic or the unknown.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Marco Polo was the most famous traveller of his time. His voyages began in 1271 with a visit to China, after which he served the Kubilai Khan on numerous diplomatic missions. On his return to the West, he was made a prisoner of war and met Rustichello of Pisa, with whom he collaborated on this book. The accounts of his travels provide a fascinating glimpse of the different societies he encountered: their religions, customs, ceremonies and way of life; on the spices and silks of the East; on precious gems, exotic vegetation and wild beasts. He tells the story of the holy shoemaker, the wicked caliph and the three kings, among a great many others, evoking a remote and long-vanished world with colour and immediacy.

It was perhaps the first book to achieve best-seller status before the invention of the printing press-it was certainly the most controversial. Did Venetian trader and explorer MARCO POLO (1254-1324) actually reach the court of Kublai Khan, serve the emperor as his emissary, and journey the distant lands of Cathay for 17 years, as he relates in his Travels of Marco Polo? The question still hasn't quite been settled today... but whether Polo experienced firsthand the wonders of ancient China, retold tales he heard from Arab travelers along the Silk Road, or simply invented half his stories, this remains a delightful read for fans of history, adventure, and medieval literature.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.