ABSTRACT

If Marco Polo was extraordinary it was because of his book. His travels alone do not seem to have made him so in his own time, and they ought not to in ours. Were it not for the book he would be only one of several Polos about whom nothing is known save that they procreated, litigated and died. During the renaissance Polo became an 'authority', alongside the ancients and surviving them as someone to be read on the places many Europeans were now seeing for themselves, for the New World was regarded as part of East Asia. The problem for Polo's medieval readers was that his version was not obviously more correct than the accepted one. Their neglect of Polo does not mean contemporary intellectuals were purblind or sequacious, the type to turn away from a telescope. Polo's greatest contemporary impact was on the fund of plot and anecdote available to other writers.