Marco Polo

Author Ben Thompson and Professor of History Dr. Pat Larash discuss one of the most famous explorers in history, Marco Polo, who traveled to the edges of the earth and brought back amazing stories of unbelievable lands that inspired all of Europe to seek out trade, exploration, and travel for the decades to come. But his story begins with the travels of his father and his uncle -- two Venetian traders who left home in search of treasure, and ended up in the middle of Byzantine politics, a Mongol civil war, and even into the court of the Emperor of China himself.

I’ve never written about Marco Polo before, so there are no Badass of the Week links available for this two-part episode.

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Episode Transcript (Part I):

It's 1268. Venice is teeming with crowds, sailors and traders moving off and on ships, unloading goods to be traded and sold across the world. At the edge of one of these docks stands an orphaned 15 year old boy. He's watching the ships come in and out, as he does every day, wishing for something more from his life. It wouldn't be long before more arrived in the form of a mysterious man knocking on his door. It's the boy's father. He tells him that he's returned from the palace of the Emperor of China, where he met the Mongol Khan and received a letter to deliver directly to the Pope. After he delivers this letter, he's going back. He asks the boy a question. Do you want to go on an adventure? Have you ever wished for something more?

Pat [00:01:14] Hey, Ben, do you have us to tell me about?

Ben [00:01:17] Well, one thing I do want to talk about today is that I'm going to be traveling soon.

Pat [00:01:20] As one does.

Ben [00:01:21] Yeah, exactly.

Pat [00:01:22] Where are you traveling to?

Ben [00:01:23] I am going to Brazil. My my wife and her family are from Brazil, and I'm going to be going back for a couple of months to stay there. You know, I get thinking about airline travel. Yeah. And one thing with airline travel is you just like it's just it's brutal, right? It's just it's so hard. You're sitting there at the at the terminal. You've got, like your brown bag with, like McDonald's French fries that you're jamming into your mouth. Everybody's unhappy. You got to wait in the TSA lines. Yeah. There's crying babies and and, you know, all the people working the counter are mad at you. And there's this huge lines. You have to wait for everything. Everything's overpriced.

Pat [00:02:01] Are they mad at you specifically, Ben?

Ben [00:02:03] Sometimes it depends.

Pat [00:02:05] What you do when you do bad. Come on.

Ben [00:02:08] It depends on how the baby's being, I guess.

Pat [00:02:10] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ben [00:02:12] And your reward at the end of all of this stuff is that you get to sit in this tiny aircraft, in this cramped seat like I'm tall, and my knees bump the thing and the baby's screaming.

Pat [00:02:22] Okay, just for the record, I am petite, I am small. So. Okay, like, at least I've got that going for me. But yeah, and the thing is, like, it should be totally cool and awesome because, like, you're flying.

Ben [00:02:35] Yeah, but we totally lose sight of that, right? All I'm thinking is that, like, I'm squished and my back hurts, and I'm wearing a pair of crappy headphones trying to watch some ten year old movie on my telephone because they don't have screens on the on the airplane anymore. And like, the baby's kicking me and throwing Cheerios at the flight attendant. And, you know, so it's it's it's easy to complain about this stuff. Like I think comedians make entire careers out of complaining about airline travel. But yeah.

Pat [00:03:01] It's funny because it's true.

Ben [00:03:03] Yes, exactly. Everybody kind of can relate to that a little bit. But it's what you said, right? You're flying you're flying through the air like you could literally pee. Everybody listening to this podcast could all tap into a new window and buy a ticket to somewhere in the world, like if you want to. And you you have maybe not the expendable income, but you have the income.

Pat [00:03:24] Or the or the like. The like the points from your credit card or like frequent flier.

Ben [00:03:29] The airline miles or whatever.

Pat [00:03:31] Like, yeah.

Ben [00:03:31] A large number of people in the world could within 24 hours, be literally anywhere else in the world, which is just amazing to think about, right? Yeah. Yeah. You've got to this the price of admission is like the $27 French fries at McDonald's.

Pat [00:03:47] But as a disappointing pretzels or whatever on the right.

Ben [00:03:51] Yeah, they drop, they throw a bag of pretzels at you and they give you a glass of like sparkling water and then you know, and then the dude in front of you puts a seat back all the way and you're squished.

Pat [00:04:01] Oh, my goodness. Yes, yes. Yeah. I feel like not this podcast, but like if we had a different podcast on random etiquette stuff, we could do an entire podcast on airplane etiquette.

Ben [00:04:12] If we were able to send a letter back to the year 1250 to Venice, Italy. And if you were able to tell somebody, then you have the capability to travel anywhere in the world within 24 hours, it would blow their minds because this is back in the day when everybody is going everywhere on foot or by horseback or by boat, and travel takes forever. And nobody sees anything in the world. Right. In the old days, it's a it's a war. It's and it's a quest to go see this thing.

Pat [00:04:41] It is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ben [00:04:43] So I'm going to talk you about Marco Polo because he is on a quest. He is out there with his father and his uncle. And these guys are going to travel tens of thousands of miles on foot, horseback by ship, by camel, through uncharted territory, is full of bandits and pirates and warlords and man eating creatures and a myriad of other unimaginably hazardous perils. So we're going to talk about Marco Polo. But his dad and his uncle are also extremely interesting characters. And I think we're going to have to actually split this into two episodes.

Pat [00:05:21] I think you're right, Ben.

Ben [00:05:21] Yeah, Yeah. Is Dad and his uncle are so interesting that I think we can we can do part one about mostly their adventures and kind of pick up Marco in part two. And I think that might be a fun way to break this out because his dad's bad ass enough as he is.

Pat [00:05:36] Oh, totally. Yeah.

Ben [00:05:37] Okay, so. So let's get into the first part of the story. The Markopolos story begins with his father, Niccolo Polo, and Niccolo leaves his pregnant wife in 1254. Nicolo and his brother Maffeo decide that they are going to go to Constantinople. They're in Venice currently, and Venice is this big trading empire.

Pat [00:06:07] It's right on the coast. They've got a Navy.

Ben [00:06:09] Yeah. Big naval force like the big Navy is putting them at odds with the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople. And so this one Venetian guy, he's like, 80 years old. But he decides that, like, Constantinople has kind of opened its doors to these crusaders. This one rabble rouser guy comes in there and is like, Hey, actually, like, aren't the Byzantines Orthodox? Isn't that also not Catholic? Maybe we should just plunder Constantinople since we're here already. So they do. And they ransack Constantinople and they create what's called the Latin Empire. It's very crusader, very medieval. What they do to the Constantinople. It's a bloodbath and they overthrow it. And they throw out the Byzantine emperors, and they put in a Catholic emperor. And this is a very small window of time, but this is the window of time that we're talking about right now. And so Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, they decide they're going to go there and try to like there's a Venetian quarter in Constantinople now, and there's a big trading hub, and there's a lot of opportunity to be had there. So in 1254, Nikola goes there to kind of take advantage of it. This is about 50 years after the Fourth Crusade. So a decent chunk of time, like time is weird with the medieval stuff because everything takes 85 years to get anywhere. So when Niccolo gets there, like all of the domes of the big Orthodox churches still have all of the copper and gold pried off of them. So everything looks kind of weird when he gets there, right?

Pat [00:07:37] So people had like basically been looting the siding off of the roofs of these religious buildings.

Ben [00:07:44] They took everything that wasn't nailed down and even some stuff that was like.

Pat [00:07:49] They've.

Ben [00:07:49] Ransacked that town. Pretty brutal, but but not necessarily like perpetrated by our heroes. So I'm willing to I'm willing to move forward with it.

Pat [00:07:59] Okay. It was the general context within which are heroes were heroic.

Ben [00:08:04] Yes. Okay. So so these two brothers are setting up shop in Constantinople and they are living in the Venetian Quarter and they're selling in gemstones. They're trading gemstones, they're doing merchant t commerce stuff. They're making money. They were merchants from Venice, and they were doing Merchant of Venice kind of things. And they were.

Pat [00:08:22] Okay. Yeah. Big numbers get bigger.

Ben [00:08:24] They stay there for about five years. But then things start to get kind of crazy. In Constantinople, there's a lot of there's a lot of unrest, right? You've got these Catholics that have come in from Venice and a couple of other places in Europe, but it's Constantinople. They're all orthodox. They all kind of it's Byzantium. Like it's literally the town that used to be called Byzantium, like. These are occupiers and they're not welcome in. And Niccolo and Maffeo kind of read the winds and they decide that they're going to leave. They're going to get out of there and go do something else. So they decide they're going to head north to they're just going to go right across the Black Sea to Crimea.

Pat [00:09:01] Oh, Crimea, Yeah.

Ben [00:09:02] Which you might have heard of before. Yeah. They go there, they seal a cross and they land in Crimea and they find out oh eight Actually, Crimea has been completely overrun by the golden horde of the Mongol Empire.

Pat [00:09:12] Wait, wait, Hold on. This is a this is the Mongol Empire who is based kind of way the hell out there on the other side of the continent.

Ben [00:09:23] Yes. So 1259. This is the height of the Mongol Empire, right? Like they have created through through a lot of blood and beheading and killing. They have forged the the largest contiguous land empire in human history before and since. And it stretches all the way out across the steps, all the way across the Ukraine and the Crimea and Russia and all of this stuff. And when they land in the in Crimea, they realize like, oh, this is this is Mongol land. So Nikola Maffeo, they're there. They're curious. Right? They the place they were going to go is kind of a bust for them because it's been plundered and ransacked and and pillaged and probably lots of people are dead.

Pat [00:10:06] Yeah, that would kind of suck.

Ben [00:10:07] Yeah. 1259 It's kind of like Genghis Khan is dead, but like, his grandsons are running things now, so the Mongol Horde is kind of split up into separate tribes, all kind of run by separate empires, all run by different grandsons of Genghis Khan.

Pat [00:10:23] And this is Genghis Khan. So he might have multiple grandsons like he get around, you know.

Ben [00:10:29] Tons, tons of grandchildren. More of them will appear as we continue through the story. So Nikola and Maffeo decide they're going to go to a mongol town called Sarai. We know it was the seat of power for the Golden Horde in the region. We know it was on the Volga River. We assume it. Was probably along the Russia Kazakhstan border on the Volga. But we don't know exactly where it is and we don't know exactly where it is because it's the it's the palace of Sarai, but it's mostly tents. I mean, the Mongols are not build a city kind of guys. They are like.

Pat [00:11:04] And I mean, what do you mean? But it's tense. I mean, like and it's tense. I mean, like these like to get.

Ben [00:11:10] To sleep, but it's.

Pat [00:11:11] Well, yeah. I mean, these are your people. You're too trendy. And here's the thing about real estate and buildings. It's like you have to maintain it, you know? I mean, maybe. Maybe your thoughts are the way to go. You know, you just kind of.

Ben [00:11:23] Keep your water heater breaks. You just set the whole place on fire and then go move on to the next.

Pat [00:11:29] Okay. For example. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, moving on. But yeah.

Ben [00:11:33] So Sarai is the headquarters of Burki Khan, who is the grandson of Genghis Khan.

Pat [00:11:39] He's what? He's a grandson of Genghis Khan.

Ben [00:11:42] He's a grandson through Genghis, his oldest son. Okay, So.

Pat [00:11:47] Okay, so he's got, like, higher.

Ben [00:11:48] Up in the higher up in the in the hierarchy of grandsons of Genghis Khan. Yeah. And he's living in Saray, and these two Venetian traders show up with a bunch of gems and are like, Hey, what's going on? And he immediately takes a liking to them. He wants them to help manage some of his stuff. So he's kind of brings these guys into his inner circle, which is big for them, right? They're kind of big fish in a small pond like medium level Venetian slash Constantinople. Traders who end up in like a village of sorts in Kazakhstan who, like, you know, they can make some stuff happen that some of the local people can't. And they they they end up becoming a position of prominence that they wouldn't have attained in Constantinople.

Pat [00:12:31] So are they like outside consultants?

Ben [00:12:33] Basically? There's a lot of that, some translators, some some of that kind of thing.

Pat [00:12:37] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Translators. Yeah.

Ben [00:12:40] And that goes well for about a year, which is like just kind of how things worked in the Middle Ages. Like you stay there for the winter and then all of a sudden you're there for a year.

Pat [00:12:49] Yeah. Because like, who wants to travel during the winter.

Ben [00:12:52] Honestly, Right. So that's going well for them. Up until the point at which Burki Khan gets into a civil war with who'll argue Khan, who is a different grandson of getting his Khan. He is the leader of the Il Khanate, which is basically Persia, Iran, Iraq area. So the eliminate and the the Golden Horde go to war and suddenly you've got Mongols riding around with like lances and compound bows and the Polos decide like, we got to get out of here. This is not working out for us. We got to go. So where do they go? We got to go back. The way we came from are going to go back to Constantinople. Then from there we'll go back to Venice. Maybe I'll see my wife for the first time in two decades. Maybe not. Who knows?

Pat [00:13:32] Whoa, whoa, whoa. Two decades.

Ben [00:13:33] A decade. I think it's like 15 years or so. It's been like, ten years of this.

Pat [00:13:39] Like a nontrivial amount of time.

Ben [00:13:41] Let's see. At this point, we are looking at this point has been six years.

Pat [00:13:46] Okay. Okay. Six years. Okay. Which is. Yeah, you know, that's a minute.

Ben [00:13:51] That's a long trip. Yeah. And so they decide they're going to go back to Constantinople and then go into Venice through Constantinople. But there's a problem. Remember how these guys left in 1259 because they were worried about the impending unrest? Oh.

Pat [00:14:03] Yes.

Ben [00:14:04] Well, in 1260, the Byzantine Emperor retakes Constantinople from the Latin Empire. This is the end of the Latin Empire as we know it. He burns the entire Venetian quarter to the ground, blinds every Venetian person he can get his hands on by putting out their eyes, cuts out their tongues that tell him that like that they landed in all of the Mongols, cut everybody's head off, like the Byzantine emperors, cutting everybody's eyes out like, Yeah, brutal.

Pat [00:14:31] Okay. Hey, hey, hey, Bad ass nation. Don't cut off body parts of other peoples, right?

Ben [00:14:37] There is a civil war between who logger con and and Burkey con. The polos do not want to be involved in any of this stuff that's going on, and none.

Pat [00:14:46] Of us want to be involved in this, Ben. I mean, like, we want to be far away. We want to be in a place that is not here. We want to be in place that is not the Volga River.

Ben [00:14:53] Yes, they do not want to be involved in the Mongol Civil War, but their only way back to Venice is through Constantinople, which every Venetian there is like getting their eyes put out and their tongues cut out or whatever bad, horrible things are happening to these people, that everything's burned to the ground. So what do you do? You go east and what's east of Kazakhstan?

Pat [00:15:13] Where east is this like we east is is that a bit of a backtrack?

Ben [00:15:17] It's got to be. I mean, where is he going to go? Like north.

Pat [00:15:19] Okay. Yeah, Yeah. Going to.

Ben [00:15:21] Siberia. No, west across Lake. The the kind of the steppe that's probably still golden horde territory. You're going to get attacked. Yes. So they cross east into Kazakhstan. And what's there? Do you know what it is? You know, it's the east of Kazakhstan though, is more Kazakhstan. And it just goes on forever. They cross Kazakhstan, they cross into use back Astana. They're going across steppe and rock. And at some point they run. Out of food and water and they run out of supplies and they end up in this town called Bukhara, which is in use back Stan, which is probably smaller than the capital of the Golden Horde. But Nicolo and Maffeo get there and they have no recourse. They can't afford to go back. They can't afford to go forward. They're out of everything. All their supplies have run out there and trekking across the step in the mountains, in the desert forever. And they're stuck and they end up here and they are there for three years.

Pat [00:16:20] Three years?

Ben [00:16:21] Oh, they just cannot leave.

Pat [00:16:22] Wow.

Ben [00:16:23] And they're just kind of trying to make a living in this town. And then they kind of catch a break after three years. They catch a break. Remember, I was talking about who Lago Con, the leader of the Ilcoin, which is one of these successor empires of Genghis Khan. There's a messenger from Largo Con, and he is on his way to China to deliver a message to Kublai Khan, who is the head of the Mongol Empire in.

Pat [00:16:46] China, because the Mongols are in charge of China right now.

Ben [00:16:49] Right. The Mongols have taken over everything. They've taken over everything, like basically east of Vienna. His Mongols reign. The empire was huge, but it ended up breaking up after the death of Genghis into sign kind of his sons and grandsons, kind of dividing the empire up among themselves. And. And Kubla Khan is now the Yuan emperor of China.

Pat [00:17:08] Okay, so let's just pause for a moment. Yuan Emperor of China. That means that he's, like, established a dynasty.

Ben [00:17:14] Yes, he has established a dynasty in China. And we're going to see Kublai Khan a lot more as the story progresses. But he is doing his thing in China. And Niccolo and Rafael were like, well, let's go check that out. Let's go see what's up with that. And so they travel with this messenger and this kind of Mongol bodyguard from the Mongol Army out to China to see Kublai Khan. And they travel along the Silk Road. And one thing that's important when we're talking about Marco Polo, is that Marco Polo didn't, quote, discover China. No. From Italy. He was not the first European to go there. You know, the Silk Road is old. Silk Road predates him by 1300 years.

Pat [00:17:54] Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like we've got poets in the time of the Roman Emperor Augustus, which is like first century BCE, BCE, first century CE, four century A.D.. Talking about silk? Yeah. You know.

Ben [00:18:07] Yeah. I mean, this is an old thing of.

Pat [00:18:09] Yeah, this is an old thing.

Ben [00:18:10] But it's dangerous and it's still dangerous 1300.

Pat [00:18:12] Years later. Oh, yeah.

Ben [00:18:14] 4000 miles. It's desert, It's steppe. It's the Gobi Desert. It's dangerous. You know, You can't get rid of all the bandits and the pirates and the people who are going to try to ambush you as they're walking along this route.

Pat [00:18:24] And even if even without the bandits, traveling is an ordeal. Yeah.

Ben [00:18:28] What happens if you get sick or a leg? Yeah. You hopefully don't die on the trail like it's Oregon Trail, but it's. Yeah, probably it's Oregon Trail, but it's ten x the length, right?

Pat [00:18:38] Exactly. And like what? Like what if you fall off your horse? What if you break your ankle? What if your horse breaks their ankle?

Ben [00:18:43] You're in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. Last gasp for 4000 miles, right?

Pat [00:18:47] Yes.

Ben [00:18:50] But they're traveling with this Mongol entourage, so they make it. And Niccolo and Maffeo meet Kublai Khan in Beijing, and he likes them for the same reason that Burki Khan liked them. I'm going to talk more about Kublai Khan a little bit, but the important thing right now is that he is fascinated by the West. These aren't the first Westerners to come out there, but Kublai doesn't get a lot of Westerners come out there. There isn't really a sea route yet. We're going to go to two China. You've got to go by land. And not a lot of people want to make that trip. So Cooper likes them and he wants to foster trade between the West. And he's also weirdly kind of fascinated by Christianity. So Kubla Khan's mother, her name is I'm going to butcher this, but it's Gog Tani. She's amazing. She, like was a single mom pretty early on and like was able to wrest power for Kubla Khan as the Yuan emperor of China through diplomatic means while trying to negotiate with Genghis Khan's other grandsons. Right. Like, she's amazing. And we could do a whole thing about her. Like she's she's the reason Kublai Khan is there.

Pat [00:19:54] Yeah, she sounds pretty bad ass.

Ben [00:19:55] She's amazing. Yeah, but we're going to talk about a dude that we haven't even mentioned yet, and I don't want to get too much into Kublai Khan. And. And so we got tiny, but. But she was a nestorian Christian. They call them Affail were probably Catholic or certainly Catholic. But you will see that like religion does not play a huge role in the polo's lives and adventures. The important thing to know is that it's does that she was Christian and of some flavor which made Kublai Khan interested in it. And so what Kublai Khan says to Nikola and Maffeo, he says to the brothers is, you know, I like you guys, you're cool. He shows them a really fun time and is amazing palace in China. And I'll talk more about that in a little bit. But then he's like, Here's what I want you guys to do. I want you to go back and I want you to bring a letter to the Pope. So it gives him a couple of things. He gives them a letter to the pope in Rome. I want you to send a hundred. Christian's to my court to teach my court about Christianity in Western culture. I want a vial of lamp oil from the lantern at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

Pat [00:21:02] So the Holy Sepulcher, like the tomb where Christ was.

Ben [00:21:05] Yes. He wants holy oil from Christ's tomb in Jerusalem. He wants a hundred Christians and he wants this letter delivered to the Pope in Rome. And he gives Apollos what is called a paisa, which is a a little strip of solid gold, not very big, a couple of inches wide, a couple of inches tall. It's basically stamped with like Kublai Khan says that anybody who is a subject of the Mongol Empire must give these men anything they ask for.

Pat [00:21:33] Okay. So it's like a kind of a passport, but like a passport with benefits or something, or.

Ben [00:21:38] It's a blank check. It's like it's an unlimited credit card.

Pat [00:21:42] Yeah.

Ben [00:21:42] It is a seal of approval. And they walk back across the Silk Road 4000 miles.

Pat [00:21:49] This is this is not 4000 steps, which I might reasonably do before lunch. This is 4000 miles.

Ben [00:21:55] 4000 miles is the United States from New York to L.A. and back. That's a long walk. I guess they ride a horse, but. Or several horses, probably. But that's a long way.

Pat [00:22:08] Do they need new shoes? Do the horses need new shoes?

Ben [00:22:11] Probably everybody needs new shoes, new pants, new everything.

Pat [00:22:15] Oh, God. New parts of his mind. Moving on.

Ben [00:22:17] So they arrive back in L.A., and they arrive there in 1268, and they go to the bishop of soccer and they say, We need to go talk to the pope. Can you help us? And the bishop Walker says the pope died and we haven't elected a new one yet. Ooh, so awkward. You got this mission Rubicon. It's 1268. You're in Walker. What do you think these guys did?

Pat [00:22:41] Oh, wow. Okay. Many options spring to mind. None of them probably realistic. One of them is like, do a Weekend at Bernie's where you sort of, like, make like, a fake pope that you just forge.

Ben [00:22:53] The pope's signature. I think that's heresy.

Pat [00:22:55] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I'm not saying any of these are, like, cool. It's just like, what my people who are freaking out actually do.

Ben [00:23:02] I'll tell you what they did. They went home to Venice to see how his wife was doing after 15 years.

Pat [00:23:07] Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Ben [00:23:11] It was like, Well, I guess I am waiting for the new pope to get elected. I'll go home and see how my wife is doing after the last 15 years.

Pat [00:23:17] Do we know how she was doing? Do sources tell us that.

Ben [00:23:20] She's been dead for 14 years?

Pat [00:23:22] Oh, snap.

Ben [00:23:24] She died not long after childbirth.

Pat [00:23:26] Oh, shit.

Ben [00:23:27] And so she's not there. Oh, but instead, he sucks. He finds something else. He finds Marco.

Pat [00:23:35] Polo. Marco Polo.

Ben [00:23:38] Polo. He finds his son, who is 15 years old now and has never met him and didn't probably think he was still alive or existed in the first place. He finds Marco Polo, 15 years old, living on the docks of Venice with his aunt and uncle doing.

Pat [00:23:58] Dark things.

Ben [00:23:58] Doing dark things, trying to learn the trade of being a merchant. But not there yet. He's apprenticing at stuff he's loading and unloading things off of boats. He is just your average, like dock guy. This is just kind of a Harry Potter situation for this guy. He is just living with his aunt and uncle, hanging out, bored, watching all the ships come and go out of the Venice, Venice Harbor without any possible chance of getting on any of them. Yeah. And and Nicolo and Maffeo go up to him and they say, Hi, I'm your dad and your uncle. Good to meet you, Marco.

Pat [00:24:34] I am your father.

Ben [00:24:36] Yes, I'm here. Hi. I am your dad, and this is your uncle. And we are on a mission from Kublai Khan, the Yuan emperor of China, to deliver a message to the Pope. And do you want to go on an adventure?

Pat [00:24:50] So I'm guessing young Marco says a sea or. Yes. And then maybe his next thing is like, I have questions. Or maybe he does have questions. Maybe he's just okay. He's he's 15. He's 15. So like, this is like maybe 10th graders, maybe 11th graders. And if someone comes along and says, Hey, I'm from Kublai Khan, the young emperor of China, and I have a mission to the pope. My guess is that a 15 year old might say healthier.

Ben [00:25:19] Yeah, fuck, yeah. That's what he says. Yeah. No questions asked. Get me out of here. Let's go. Yeah. And so, I mean, there's a great moment here. And Marco writes about it in his book of, like, I only ever watch these ships come and go. I've walked past all of these stores that sell all these amazing things to adventurers. Suddenly, my long lost dad shows up and is like, Here's our boat. We got to go buy some shit for this adventure. Do you want to come to this armor and weapons store with me? Do you want to come to, like, the outfitter with me? Do you want to buy some of this crap that you've only ever looked at through the front window of the store before? We're going to load the ship up with spices. We're going to buy all these crazy goods and bring them with us to our on our adventure. Yeah, this kid's mind is blown. Is the best thing that's ever happened to him in his entire life.

Pat [00:26:06] He's like, You had me at Hi. Yeah. Or Yeah, Okay. And speaking of myself as Pat, I'm like, You had me at spices. This is like, okay, these days, like, you just go down to the grocery store and you, like, get like, cinnamon for like $3. But in those days, spices were intensely luxury goods, right?

Ben [00:26:25] Yeah. I mean, you know, like salt, right? Salt was a massively expensive thing in the in the Roman Empire.

Pat [00:26:31] Right, Exactly. You could get paid in salt. Yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:26:34] Forget about, like, cumin or whatever.

Pat [00:26:36] Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so Nicholas and Maffeo show up and they're like, Hey, want to, like, I don't know, hang out with us and want to hang out with, like, a place that is not here.

Ben [00:26:49] Yeah. Do you want to go meet the Pope? You want to go meet the Emperor of China? Okay. Yeah, Sounds great. Let's go, Dad. So they take off, but there's still no pope. They're in Venice. They're outfitting their stuff. They're getting all the gear together. They're going to go to, like, go back to Kublai Khan. But there's still no pope. They haven't elected a new one. It's 1271. It's been three years and there's no pope still down there. I mean, yeah, I mean, surprise, I guess. But like, there's a lot of politics involved with who's the next pope. It's not just the most holiest dude on Earth. It's kind of like there's some politics involved among the College of Cardinals as to who they pick can be political things in play. And there's an argument about who should be the next pope. And so Niccolo and my father, they don't really want to keep the Mongol Khan waiting. So they just decide like, you know what, let's just go get that oil from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and go back and we'll we'll see if we can get 100 Christians. We'll see what we can do.

Pat [00:27:42] And just like, okay, when we say oil, like, okay, this is oil that obviously has a lot riding on it, but it's not petroleum. It's oil like oil that you anoint someone on the forehead with. Yeah, holy oil. Myrrh.

Ben [00:27:53] Okay, Specifically myrrh. Okay. Yeah. Which I don't I don't know. Beyond like, the three Wise Men stories. I know it's an oil. I know that it's in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It's got a very special religious meaning to it. But that's what we're talking about. Yeah.

Pat [00:28:08] Yeah. It's a it's like a resin, like a sap that you get from certain trees. But like, okay, like that's like the physical description, but like, yeah, it's got a lot of symbolic stuff riding on it. Yeah.

Ben [00:28:19] Right. And you were talking about, you know, exotic spices and things and myrrh is an exotic spice, right? That's why they brought it to Jesus when he was born. So. They sail for Acre Laguna. Go. We're just going to go back and we'll see what happens. They get to Acre and we go meet that bishop that they saw before. His name is Teo Baldo Visconti. They're like, Hey, you know, we're just going to go, we're going to go back. So do you want to send him? Do you want to send a message to Kublai Khan? Can you help us get the the myrrh from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. He's kind of acre is like the Crusaders seat in the area. So he's kind of the bishop of this whole area. And he's like, well, it's like, why do you guys hang out for a little bit? And we'll see what happens. And so the Polos hang out for about a year in soccer and the church finally elects a new pope in 1271. The white smoke comes and the person who gets elected pope is.

Pat [00:29:14] Is.

Ben [00:29:15] The Bishop of soccer, Teo Baldo Visconti, the dude who they're literally living in his house or in his like in his general vicinity.

Pat [00:29:23] Okay. Note to self, if you want to get yourself elected pope, get the polos to hang out in your residence.

Ben [00:29:30] Yes, exactly. So Table of Escalante becomes Pope Gregory 10th. I always read it as Pope Gregory IX, which just sounds more awesome. So that's always how I think of him. But Gregory. Hey, I mean, that worked out that worked out pretty well for these guys. So they're like, Hey, do you want to read this letter from Kublai Khan that you've already read twice? Do you have an answer for it now? And so he does he he writes a little letter back there, like, okay, we need the oil or we need the myrrh from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Okay. Yeah, no problem. We need 100 Christians. He's like, I'll send you to about two Dominicans. Does that work? The publishers are like, That's probably fine. They'll come with us. So we're 98 guys short, but that's all right. He can come with us. So these two Dominican friars come with them, and then they head out. They're going to go by land to, uh, to. To see Kublai Khan again.

Pat [00:30:21] Yeah. All the way out across, like, across the Silk Road, across the Gobi Desert, all the way to China.

Ben [00:30:30] 4000 miles across the sometimes they're traveling with a with bigger caravans. Sometimes they are traveling mostly alone. They're carrying a baggage train full of all of those weapons and spices and things that they want to trade to Kublai Khan. The traveling in a caravan that is just full of expensive, valuable things through areas that are largely dominated by warlords and bandits. And it's just these three dudes. And occasionally they can join up with a bigger caravan for safety, but not always. Those Dominican friars from Acre, they run away almost immediately. They're just they go out on the trip. They go past Mt. Ararat in Armenia, where they believe where the they believed that Noah Noah's Ark was set, was stranded. They go through Georgia, they go past the golden domes of Baghdad. And the friars are like, Yeah, we're out. This is too terrifying. We can't do it. They run away.

Pat [00:31:27] So we're now down to Let me do the math. Zero Christians.

Ben [00:31:30] Zero one additional Christian because Marco wasn't there the original time. They're bringing one guy with him instead of 100. Okay? He's going to be an important guys, as we'll see. But. But yeah, they're 99 guys short now. What they left for, they continue it and like, like I say, like, I feel like we've almost kind of under underrepresented this 4000 mile journey. But but they go through the Dominican Friars Bale and the polo's at one point when they're in the Gobi Desert, there's a big sandstorm that comes up and bandits attack them out of this sandstorm. They're there with a much bigger caravan at this point. Like I said, they've been doing like smaller groups and bigger groups. These bandits come out of this rolling sandstorm. You can't see anything. And the Polos fight their way out with whatever they can get their hands on. Everybody else in the caravan is being killed or captured or whatever enslaved. Nobody knows what happened to any of these guys because the Polos never see any of them again. Oh no, but they escape. The three polo is escape with whatever goods they could drag out of this war with them. And then in 1275 they finally arrive at a at their destination. They arrive at them at Xanadu, which is awesome.

Pat [00:32:43] Starring Olivia Newton-John. No.

Ben [00:32:45] Right. Yeah. Except it's less it's less roller skates and more Kublai Khan Summer Palace. So it's it's a couple hundred miles northwest of Beijing. Marco Polo is now 21. He left home at 15. He's 21.

Pat [00:32:58] And he's here and he's at Xanadu and he's in China and he's like, wow.

Ben [00:33:02] It blows his mind. And this is a thing I want to mention to kind of like what we were talking about in the intro of like you and me could get on an airplane to like, we could literally while I'm talking to you, I could go on to Expedia and buy a plane ticket to the Beijing and and and be in Xanadu in two days. Right. But it took him six years from when he met his dad to when he finally got to Xanadu, when that is like a kind of a good way to kind of. Picture what this looks like for for for traveling in this time period.

Pat [00:33:33] Yeah. So if you want to travel to any place that is not like the next village over, you're committing to a year. You're committing. You're making.

Ben [00:33:43] Commitments. A commitment. Yeah.

Pat [00:33:44] And it's it's also a risk.

Ben [00:33:46] Yeah, huge risk. I mean, a lot of the people on that caravan didn't make it. And they, you know, a lot of the goods and supplies and things that were headed that way didn't never got there. Yeah. So he arrives at Xanadu and now Markopolos adventures in China are about to begin. And but this has been such an incredible story already. I think we're going to have to save the second part for next week and get into Marco Polo in part two.

Pat [00:34:13] I think so. I think this week we've given you Marco, come back next week for Polo.

Ben [00:34:17] Actually, it should be this week we gave you Polo and next week it's Marco. We're doing it backwards. It's Polo. Marco.

Pat [00:34:24] Oh, yeah, you're right. Whoops.

Ben [00:34:29] Thanks so much for listening. And we'll see you next time.

Pat [00:34:33] Badass of the Week is an iHeart radio podcast produced by High Five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Pat Larash, and Ben Thompson. Writing is by Pat and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs and Ali Lemer. Mixing and music and Sound Design is by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart. Badass of the Week is based on the website BadassoftheWeek.com, where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If you want to reach out with questions or ideas, you can email us at badasspodcast@badassoftheweek.com. If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen and tell your friends and your enemies if you want, as we'll be back next week with another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Episode Transcript (Part II):

The treasures of China and Southeast Asia are beyond anything young Marco Polo could have imagined. Ivory palaces decorated with gold, silver and jewels. Huge, sprawling fortresses that dwarf anything in Europe, wealth beyond his wildest dreams. Yet this strange new land is also rife with danger. Murderous wild beasts, cannibals, pirates and bandits roam the uncharted wilderness in search of prey. And yet, none of these apex predators are quite as dangerous as the Mongol Warriors with whom Marco Polo now finds himself. They are ferocious in battle, as he has been many times. Yet to some of these Mongol generals there's a very thin line between friend and enemy. The rewards are great. The stakes are high. The danger is very real. It will take cunning wit, bravery and a little bit of luck if Marco Polo wishes to survive to tell the tale of his adventure.

Ben: Hello and welcome back. The Badass of the Week. My name is Ben Thompson. I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Pat LaRoche and Pat. We are here to do part two of Marco Polo, and I just kind of wanted to see if maybe we can get started by recapping kind of where we're at at the end of part one.

Pat [00:01:25] Yeah. So we're calling this episode part two of Marco Polo, but maybe it would be better to call last week's episode like the prequel.

Ben [00:01:32] It's true. We didn't actually talk about Marco very much. And in part one, did we know?

Pat [00:01:37] I mean, we spent time on his dad and his uncle and okay, that's cool because they had adventures in their own right and they're badass in their own right. And it's also setting up the scene for what's going to happen in today's episode. And it's going to sound kind of cliched and kind of trippy, but like, this is the thing that happens in, you know, young adult fantasy novels. You've got this protagonist, you know, this young protagonist whose parents are absent for whatever reason. And Markopolos dad was not around for much of his formative years. And then all of a sudden something happens. You know, it's kind of like a cliche for fiction writing. You know, a stranger comes to town. Who's the stranger? Well, it's this guy and his brother who show up in Venice and the docks of Venice.

Ben [00:02:22] Your long lost dad here for it, I think. But like, I don't even know if this counts as being true, because it predates, like, Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter and all of that. Maybe they all got their ideas. Marco Polo.

Pat [00:02:33] Quite possibly. Quite possibly, yeah. I mean, you could argue that there's some of this in The Odyssey, sort of, you know, variation on it or whatever.

Ben [00:02:39] But yeah, that needed me.

Pat [00:02:42] No, no, no. But okay, but the truth of the matter is, you know, given the realities of travel, the realities of merchant routes, you know, you can't just hop on a plane and be somewhere, you know, at most 24 hours later, you know, you're like, schlepping along on, I don't know, like in a caravan, booked a boob tube tube, you know? And what happens while you're gone? I don't know. Your kids grow up.

Ben [00:03:09] Yeah. And it's like, you know, it's the time period where it's not that weird that you didn't see the guy for 15 years. Yeah, You assume he's dead, but you're not sure.

Pat [00:03:19] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dead. Or maybe kind of started a new life elsewhere. But as it turns out, you know, okay, we're in Venice, which, you know, is cool. It's own right? But if you're a teenager, you might feel like you're stuck there. And Marco Polo is here. He's in Venice. Boat comes in, These guys get off the boat. Something about that one guy with what is it like his face? Is he like a doppelganger or something? Marco, I am your father, except like, in a non evil way, I guess.

Ben [00:03:50] Like Gandalf and Darth Vader together.

Pat [00:03:52] Sure, why not? Yeah. Young Marco Polo, who's kind of full of energy and looking for something to do, sees his dad and his uncle, and they say, Would you like to go on an adventure? And he says.

Ben [00:04:04] He says, Hell yeah, and let's get into it. This is the story of what happened to Marco Polo and why he's the name we remember and not Niccolo Polo. So we are back and we are talking about Marco Polo in China, his first meeting with Kublai Khan. He is in Xanadu, which is, as we've mentioned, is not always the roller skating disco movie, but it is also the amazing Lake Palace complex to the northwest of Beijing. And Marco Polo, his mind is blown, right. He's 21 years old. And you got to remember, he's from Venice, which is probably the richest town in Europe at the time that he is traveling here right now. He's from basically the New York City of Europe. He gets here and he cannot fathom the size and scale and opulence of the things that he's looking at. He says its energy has 16 miles of walls that go around, several palaces constructed entirely of marble. Kublai Khan appears to him pulled on a chariot is like an amazing like throne that's on this pedestal, like pulled by four elephants. He's got a zoo with all these exotic animals in it. He's got this huge, like, hunting ground where you can hunt any kind of animal you want.

Pat [00:05:27] I was going to say you said zoo, but. Oh, please. We call it a menagerie.

Ben [00:05:32] Yeah, a menagerie. That's a better way of phrasing it. Yeah, Like he Kublai Khan is like there's a deer in this, like, hunting preserve on his property. And the way that Kublai Khan hunts them is by bringing cheetahs out on horseback and releasing them to go kill the deer For him, that's like the level that we're talking about here.

Pat [00:05:55] Release the cheetah.

Ben [00:05:56] Release the cheetahs to catch the deer. And that's how I hunts. I pointed the cheetah in the correct direction, and therefore, I am an amazing hunter. Yes. And I mean, Marco Polo has been watching the traders come in and out of the biggest commercial hub in Europe. And he just cannot imagine what he's looking at. He's like, what is this raid? And Kublai Khan is Kublai Khan is very different from the rest of the Mongol kings and cons and stuff. He is a little bit more cultured. He loves to hunt. He loves to fight. That's a very mongol thing. He likes both of those things. But he also has kind of really adopted Chinese culture. He's really kind of adopted like art and music and kind of being cool with other religions and other people and other ideas. And he kind of wants to accumulate.

Pat [00:06:49] He's just like, Hey, tell me about Christianity, because I'm curious.

Ben [00:06:52] Right, exactly right. Like, Hey, you guys nestorian Christianity?

Pat [00:06:56] Sure.

Ben [00:06:56] I mean, he's down with that. He doesn't care. He's not Catholic. He's not Nestorian Christian. He is he is Mongol religion leaning Buddhists, which is kind of the dominant Chinese religion at this time. And but he's curious. He wants to know stuff. He's like, okay, well, you guys clearly have some money. You're dressed nice when you show up. You're bringing cool stuff that I like. Maybe we can set up trade between our two peoples. Maybe we can kind of grow and learn from each other. And, and he presents himself as this kind of, I mean, for lack of a better word, renaissance man, because he is going to kind of help usher in the Renaissance with the capital. Our renaissance in in in Europe, him and Marco Polo together are going to do that. Yeah, but he is very different from anybody that Marco Polo has met. And just palaces on palaces, Right. Like he's got his whatever, 15 wives or whatever. And each of them has a palace that would rival any palace for any king in Europe. And Marco Polo just cannot imagine this stuff when he's looking at it. And he's got a little bit of an in with Kublai Khan, because Kublai Khan already likes Niccolo and Maffeo Polo.

Pat [00:08:04] He's like, Hey, you're my guys who go on missions for me. Yeah.

Ben [00:08:08] And he's like, Well, you, you know, you kind of I wanted 100 guys and you brought me one really good one, so maybe that's worth it. He brought the other stuff, like, we're kind of we're negotiating here. We're doing some prime directive kind of stuff where we're building bonds between our people without war. That's awesome. And Marco Polo makes an impression on Kublai basically immediately. Marco Polo is very interesting because he's not what you would expect from like a European explorer traveling to the Far East in the Middle Ages. He's on board with everything. He's like, I like silk. This feels awesome. No, wear it. You know, I'll try your your food I've never had before like this. Look, this looks great. Yeah, but also the spices thing that nobody's had come in before. Yeah, turmeric or whatever else goes in the chicken tikka masala. But yeah, so he's kind of on board with everything, and he runs this very interesting and very good, like, diplomatic line between being he's cool and he's personable and he's friendly and he's nice and he gets along really well with Kublai Khan and he doesn't like do the thing that a lot of Europeans do at this time, which is like be too hard core about the religious thing, you know, like, yeah, you got your religion, that's cool. You can do your thing. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life and I'm not going to like, I don't know, try to chop your head off because you're Buddhist or whatever.

Pat [00:09:24] Yeah.

Ben [00:09:26] He dresses in the little clothes, he learns the language. He kind of they can integrate himself into the society in a way that I think a lot of Europeans wouldn't have at this time. And I think that there are some things in his writing that are a little bit problematic, looking at it from 2022. But yeah, for 1270 this guy is like he is along for the ride and he is kind of going with it and it's it's great. It's very refreshing. I was very like happily surprised when I started reading some of some of the stuff that he wrote about this. It was definitely better than I was expecting. And and he just kind of integrates himself and becomes friends with the con basically right away.

Pat [00:10:07] As one does.

Ben [00:10:08] Right. He's funny and he's smart, but he's also smart enough to know when to not piss off the Mongols, because that is also an important thing that you need to kind of manage when you are. Yeah, more or less a prisoner of the con.

Pat [00:10:23] Note to self. Do not piss off the Mongols. Mhm.

Ben [00:10:26] When you are at the Mongol hordes mercy, you should just kind of try to swallow your pride every once in a while. Roll with it when he's very good at it, is good at it and he does a good job of it and he even more than Niccolo and Maffeo, he kind of rises above them even, and to become a favorite of Kublai Khan. So for the next 17 years, Marco Polo remains in China. He is an emissary, he's a diplomatic emissary. He goes on diplomatic missions, he translates documents, he does some trading stuff. He even like serves as the cons representative, like administrative representative over the city of Yangzhou. For a while. He does whatever the count needs me to do.

Pat [00:11:08] Okay. So he's so he's an outsider. He's a foreigner, and he somehow manages to find a place in the civil service or.

Ben [00:11:17] Yeah, and it works well for Kublai because Kublai Khan is also an outsider. He's a mongol administering over Han Chinese. And so he relates to Marco Polo in some way, like they find this common ground on, like we're both kind of running the show here, but neither of us are from here. Neither of us. We're both kind of out of our depth. And and there's a lot of people here who wish we weren't here. So there's a you know, there's you're able to kind of find some common ground there. And Marco Polo starts going on, travels all over Asia. He goes to Japan, he goes to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam. He goes to some of the islands, he goes to India, he's traveling all over the place and he sees all kinds of crazy stuff. Right. Ivory palaces, gold, silver, jewels, fine silks. He's eating the best foods and the spices. He's getting all of like the stuff that he's sharing dinner with the Khan, Right. Diamonds.

Pat [00:12:10] I'm getting hungry.

Ben [00:12:11] Yeah, He's like, There's diamonds. And then there's. There's scarves from Kashmir, there's ivory. There's these huge sprawling fortresses and cities and palaces all over. All over the empire that he is just amazed by. Right. The things that, you know, cities that dwarf anything that is known to the Europeans at the time. Right. And like I keep saying, he's from one of the more cosmopolitan areas of Europe. But when he gets to China, he's just like, dude, you have no idea.

Pat [00:12:41] Yeah, Venice is Venice is the shit.

Ben [00:12:44] It's amazing. I was there last summer and my mind was blown, but his mind was blown just as a heart.

Pat [00:12:49] Like Venice had its own empire. Yeah, but yeah, yeah.

Ben [00:12:52] It's the most of the Adriatic, right? Yeah. The golden pagodas in Burma. And he goes to Hangzhou, which has this huge lake in the middle of it. That's beautiful. It's got millions of inhabitants, which is mind blowing for him at the time. Right. Venice had one main square and Hangzhou has ten, and each one of them is a half mile by a half mile. Oh, wow. And it's like Kublai Khan, the way he describes it and the way that he always referred to China, Was that like the difference between China and Europe is that Kublai Khan counts his money and his people and his scale in the millions, which nobody in Europe was doing at the time. Wow. Right. Yeah, he gets it. Marco Polo gets a nickname later in his life. Marco Millions, because that's all he talks about is how he immediately yeah. Emiliano Yeah, how, how he talks about how Kublai measured things in millions and he talks about it so much, and he becomes known as. Marco Millions.

Pat [00:13:45] Marco Millions. And that's it. That sounds like a rapper name.

Ben [00:13:48] Oh, for me, I was thinking. I was thinking mob guy.

Pat [00:13:51] Oh, okay. Yeah.

Ben [00:13:51] Hey, Marco. Millions.

Pat [00:13:54] Yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:13:56] He sees some dangerous stuff, right? He encounters cannibals in Sumatra. He encounters bandits and pirates. There's a group in Myanmar that would kill travelers and cut them up because they wanted to steal their souls.

Pat [00:14:09] Ooh, that's.

Ben [00:14:10] Harsh. And Marco, millions goes there on a mission from the con to tell them to stop doing that.

Pat [00:14:17] Okay. How does this go? Does Marco succeed in telling them to stop cutting up people, or does Marco himself get cut up? Two pieces.

Ben [00:14:23] They do not cut him up and turn him into pieces. When presumably when you are the mouth of Kublai Khan, you are prevented from that particular superstition.

Pat [00:14:33] Or that might give you some cred. Yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:14:36] He so he sees unimaginable works of construction and jungle like stuff that you don't have in in Europe, right? Even just going into a jungle, it would be mind blowing for a European.

Pat [00:14:47] Yeah. Like if you're from Venice, there's like deeply cool shit in Venice and you're just like, Well.

Ben [00:14:52] It's heavily forested, right? That's how they built the whole city. They just sunk logs in the lagoon and built the city on top of it.

Pat [00:14:57] But like. But that, that was like, before. And like, the trees are now substructure. Yeah. And then you're Marco Polo and you're like, oh, wow, I'm in the jungle in the.

Ben [00:15:07] Rainforest, which like, you know, been dropped into Vietnam from, like, France.

Pat [00:15:13] Yeah, foreign.

Ben [00:15:14] Country. It's science fiction, right?

Pat [00:15:15] Yeah.

Ben [00:15:16] He's seen all these animals he's never seen before, right? Camels, horses. He rides on camels, horses and elephants just on his way to China. He rides camels, horses and elephants. Yeah. When he's there, he's seeing lions, tigers, elephants. He sees what he calls unicorns, which we think are probably rhinos. One horned big, four legs, one horn. He doesn't. He just mentions him in passing. It's like, Yeah, if you like unicorns. I got unicorns here. But we think he's probably talking about rhinos.

Pat [00:15:39] Okay. Okay. So. So he mentions these in past in passing. So she sees a creature that he believes is a unicorn or he might be a unicorn. And that's not the most important thing that he's talking.

Ben [00:15:52] He was more focused on the dudes that were going to kill him and eat is sold and he was on the rhinos. He calls them unicorns.

Pat [00:15:59] But yeah. SharePoint. SharePoint. Okay. Like, Oh, wow. Mythical creature. Oh dude don't no.

Ben [00:16:05] Get me does not He sees he sees guys off the coast of Singapore that are called shark charmers that like keep the sharks away from the fishermen. He hunts, he hunts wolves, he uses eagles to hunt wolves, and he uses cheetahs to hunt deer.

Pat [00:16:22] Well, he uses the eagles. Is that's like a mongol thing.

Ben [00:16:24] Totally a mongol thing, right? The Mongols love to fight and hunt and Kublai Khan, no matter how cultured he is, how advanced he is among the Mongol people, he is still got that Mongol heart and he likes to kill things and he hunts. Yeah, we have the golden Eagles that like kill wolves.

Pat [00:16:41] But yeah, but like the thing about the like hunting with eagles, that's a thing even to today.

Ben [00:16:46] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he goes and does that, he does the cheetah hunting thing which I don't think it's a deal anymore. I don't think they have cheetahs in Asia anymore but I mean it's Animal Planet stuff right. It's, but it's also science fiction. It's like a dandy adventure, right? Where you seen all these crazy monsters, the main in creatures, these Sumatra, these tigers are like, they don't have any of the stuff where he came from. Yeah, and it's blowing his mind, but he's. He's doing this and then he gets he works his way up. I mean, 17 years, a long time. He's he's doing all of these things while he's there. He eventually gets promoted up to, you know, as the Mongol czar. When you get promoted high enough, you suddenly start taking on military details, right.

Pat [00:17:24] As one does.

Ben [00:17:24] Right. So he starts marching with the Mongol Army. Yeah. On missions to like quell bandits or expand the Empire or do various Mongol related things. So he is marching at the head of an army of 200,000 mounted Mongols. And I want to put this in perspective.

Pat [00:17:41] Yeah, the 200,000 mounted Mongols. So this is 200,000 human beings on 200,000 horses.

Ben [00:17:48] They usually would carry three horses.

Pat [00:17:50] Boy.

Ben [00:17:50] So, okay, this is the point I want to make. And this is a point that I think is very important when understanding Marco Polo that we need to talk about, which is the scale of what he is experiencing, is not on the level of anything anybody in Europe could comprehend. Yeah. So let's look for reference. Let's look at the big battle that created England as we know it today, Right. The Battle of Hastings, 1066. It's 200 years before this, but time progresses. Everybody is still riding on horseback and shooting bow and arrows and fighting with swords, right? Yeah, it's 200 years, but like, not a lot has changed technologically. William the Conqueror had a stirrups, but that's know like the technological advancement over the Romans. Yeah. And so Battle of Hastings William the Conqueror goes and he fights and he defeats the he defeats the Saxons and he takes over England. We don't know for sure, but best estimate, 20,000 soldiers total among both sides combined. Marco Polo was writing at the head of an army that is ten times the size of that entire battlefield. Wow. It's something that we need to think about while we talk about him. Because, you know, one thing that is kind of a challenge we're talking about, Marco Polo, is that like we've seen pictures of all the stuff that he's talking about and we've you can go to a zoo and see a rhino now. And 250,000 guys is smaller than the current US Army. But compared to what was going on in Europe in 1200, this is how to control.

Pat [00:19:16] Yeah. And also just in like actual human terms, like as a human being on the ground, how big is 200,000?

Ben [00:19:26] You imagine the sound of 200,000 horses riding by you.

Pat [00:19:29] Like, yeah.

Ben [00:19:30] He'll take an hour for them right past you. Right? Maybe longer.

Pat [00:19:35] Yeah. And how does an actual human being conceptualize 200,000? Like if one goes to a football stadium.

Ben [00:19:43] Depends on the stadium. But you're looking at 60, maybe. Yeah. Three football stadiums worth of people. And that would be like NFL stadiums. Not like the high school football stadiums. Unless you're in Texas, right?

Pat [00:19:53] Oh, yeah.

Ben [00:19:55] Marco's there for some pretty big battles. So he's going into I mean, he travels everywhere, right? So he's going through jungle. He's passing through ancient ruins of old like karma and old vet like ruins in the jungle, right? Yeah. He's going through the Gobi Desert. He's got there's old ruins, there's current stuff. He's fighting in the desert. He's fighting in the jungle. He's traveling everywhere. Over these 17 years, he gets sent everywhere that he can possibly go. And he's leading these armies, and he starts to get a little bit disillusioned by what's going on. So he likes all of this opulence and the spices. He loves the like he loves the food, He loves the the language. He loves the culture, he loves the dress and and all of this stuff. He doesn't love the slaughtering of the women and children. He doesn't love the like launching catapults at buildings and killing people and beheading all of the surviving men and the the the real like nitty gritty Mongol stuff that the Mongols are still doing at this time period. This kind of like like I said, Kublai Khan likes to hunt and he likes to fight and he likes to wage war and he likes to, you know, subject his enemies to his wrath. But for Marco Polo, this doesn't fit the idea of Kublai Khan that he had. It was this kind of cultured renaissance man. When he's standing on this field watching the Mongol Army like behead prisoners of war and women and children, he does. He doesn't like it. And he's like, oh, maybe actually this guy is not as awesome as I thought he was.

Pat [00:21:26] Yeah.

Ben [00:21:27] And he starts to get a little bit sad once he gets into this level of of power where he's marching with the army. Like, it was really fun when we all dressed up and marched in a parade. But it's, it's less fun now that I'm standing on this blood soaked sand.

Pat [00:21:42] With actually.

Ben [00:21:44] Screaming for their families, you.

Pat [00:21:45] Know? Yeah. No, I see, I see. I see. He gets to see the sausage being made, but it's like, no, it's like he gets to see humans being decapitated, the.

Ben [00:21:54] Sausage being made. It's like a great example, right? Like, that's how these people are being treated, right? Like.

Pat [00:21:59] Well, this is what.

Ben [00:22:00] That's how these Mongol lieutenants dealt with their prisoners are like.

Pat [00:22:04] Yeah.

Ben [00:22:05] It's brutal and it's awful. And it's you know, it's one thing to be like the U.S., you know, drive your enemies before you even hear the limitations of their women. But it's a very different thing to I mean, that's a Genghis Khan quote. I should stipulate that, you know.

Pat [00:22:16] To actually hear the lamentations, it's.

Ben [00:22:18] Very different to be standing there watching that happen, you know?

Pat [00:22:21] Yeah.

Ben [00:22:21] Because it takes hours, you know, and.

Pat [00:22:25] It takes hours. And also it's like horrific, Right?

Ben [00:22:27] Exactly. You just standing there watching like a horror movie for hours, right?

Pat [00:22:32] Like, yeah.

Ben [00:22:33] Brutal, brutal stuff. And he did not like it. He was not a fan of this. So that starts to disillusion him. And the other thing that he's thinking at this point is that like he's been there 17 years. Kublai Khan he was he's he was 21 when he got there were Kublai Khan was older. Kublai Khan is old now, right. Kublai Khan doesn't have much longer to live. And you know, when you're Marco Polo and you work your way in close with the Khan of the Mongol Horde, you don't do that without making a few enemies in court who are also Mongol warriors who may succeed Kublai Khan as the Khan. And yeah, Marco Polo and Niccolo and Maffeo is that and his uncle. We're like, We got to get out of here before Kublai dies. Because when Kublai dies.

Pat [00:23:14] Yeah.

Ben [00:23:15] We're done for right? Like we're going to be on the first wave of purges for whoever replaces him. So we got to go. So they go to Cuba. I'm like, We got to go. And Kublai is like, No, you're too valuable. You can't leave. Oh, so we have to ask him like five or six times. It takes them a couple of years before he finally lets them go. So he does eventually let them go. In 1291, he gives them the mission to escort his daughter, the Princess Coco Chen. She's going to go to Persia to seal a marriage alliance with the Illuminati. So it's not Hu Lago con anymore, but it's that part of the that section of the of the Horde. So this is probably incestuous in some way to some degree. But Kublai Khan daughter is going to go marry who, Lago Khan's nephew or whatever, you.

Pat [00:24:07] Know, But maybe this is like this is like baseline, you know.

Ben [00:24:12] Yeah, it's not full valyrian, but it's.

Pat [00:24:14] It's it's.

Ben [00:24:15] It's. A little Hapsburg end, I guess.

Pat [00:24:18] Yeah. Yeah. And I guess, like, this is just sort of what happens among royal houses.

Ben [00:24:24] Yeah, that's how you get. That's how you get Rasputin. You get everybody having hemophilia, and that's a unit with Rasputin.

Pat [00:24:32] Okay.

Ben [00:24:32] So they're going to go by, see, which is a kind of a new thing for Marco Polo. He's sailed to a bunch of the islands and stuff, but this is the farthest he's going to have traveled by sea.

Pat [00:24:41] So we're in 13th century. And so sea routes from China may be not completely established or.

Ben [00:24:50] You know, lots of pirates happening here. It's dangerous. He's traveling with the princess of the Mongol Empire. So he's he's not too worried about it. He's got a pretty big bodyguard entourage around him. Okay.

Pat [00:25:02] Good for him.

Ben [00:25:02] And so they go to Singapore, they go to Sumatra, they go to India, and then from India, they go by land through Persia, drop off the princess. No problems continue on towards the Black Sea and eventually decide they're going to sail for home. They don't want to go back because there's too many enemies for them in China. And after 24 years and maybe somewhere between 15 and 20,000 miles.

Pat [00:25:29] Oh, wow.

Ben [00:25:29] Marco Polo finally returns to Venice.

Pat [00:25:32] And what's Venice like when he gets back?

Ben [00:25:34] Like Venice is he returns home to Venice. And he didn't have much there, right? He had his uncle and his aunt there raised him. But like, he didn't have much to go home to. He didn't have like a wife and kids or anything like that. There he goes back in Venice, is at war with the Italian city of Genoa. You have all these Italian cities, states at the time. So Genoa and Venice are at war. So Marco Polo was like, well, okay, I'll fight to defend Venice. He he comes back, he's incredibly wealthy. He's got all of these treasures and all of these things he brought back from China with him. But he also has feels this responsibility to his hometown against the gentlemen's. And he he feels loyalty to Venice. So he goes to fight for them. He he buys a boat and he buys a tribute and he puts the trebuchet on his boat and he goes to where.

Pat [00:26:20] He has a boat and he puts a trebuchet on the boat. Yes, That's awesome.

Ben [00:26:25] Yeah. Yeah. And he commands it and he hires a crew and he commands it in battle for Venice against Genoa. And he's defeated. Yes, he is involved.

Pat [00:26:38] In a trebuchet on a boat.

Ben [00:26:40] With the trebuchet on a boat. He is defeated somewhere off the coast of of of Turkey, possibly the battle of Kurzel which is a huge battle that happened around this time period. Venice was this up and coming like very powerful trade empire. Genoa was arguing with them. There was a huge battle that took place around this time and something like a hundred Venetian galleys on one side, 80 Genoa and on the other, huge losses, huge destruction, lots of death, nothing like he'd seen with the Mongols, but lots of death and destruction and and dying. And Marco Polo and the Venetians are crushed. Right. And there was a chance that this might, like, break the Venetian Republic. They recover. But this was really, really dark moment for Venice's history. And so Marco Polo is defeated. He surrenders, his ship is bashed up, A lot of his crew are dead. The Venetian fleet is mostly destroyed. He is put in shackles and his ship is towed from the waters off the coast of Adana, Turkey, to Genoa. And he is imprisoned in a tower in Genoa overlooking the sea there. And he is kind of just thrown into this tower and locked up.

Pat [00:27:52] Oh, no. So our boys in the slammer.

Ben [00:27:54] He's in the slammer.

Pat [00:27:55] For just like.

Ben [00:27:57] For 40 years he's imprisoned for four years by the gentlemen's.

Pat [00:28:01] Yeah.

Ben [00:28:02] His cellmate is another person who had been captured by the gentlemen's. His cellmate in the tower is a dude named Rooster Cello, which I don't know if the sea is a hard or soft.

Pat [00:28:12] It's artsy.

Ben [00:28:13] Mystical cello. Use the cello, huh? Okay.

Pat [00:28:15] Mr. Keller.

Ben [00:28:16] Mr. Keller. The pizza. He was the dude from Pisa who the gentleman said, overtaken that. And they took this guy and they imprisoned him in the Tower Roost to kill. The PISA is the first Italian person to write about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in Italy. He was a famous author who had written King Arthur Stories for the People of Italy. He wrote in French and he wrote in Italian. He was a bestselling author who had been kind of imprisoned and thrown in this tower. And he is Marco Polo cellmate. And here is a thing that is 100% worth mentioning when talking about Marco Polo, is that he had no intention of telling anybody about what he had done in China until he was locked in a tower with this bestselling fiction writer for 40 years.

Pat [00:29:05] So it's like if like in some like alternate timeline, I go out and have adventures and then somehow I wind up being locked in a cell with like Stephen King or something.

Ben [00:29:16] Right. And you? Nothing to do except talk about your lives. Yeah. Marco Polo was just like, Well, yeah, I was in China for a while, and Kelly was like, Okay, what you do there?

Pat [00:29:26] Get a pen.

Ben [00:29:27] And then over the course of this four years, they write Markopolos memoirs, which he had no intention of doing, which I love. And I feel like I can't stress enough that he had no plans to write any of this down.

Pat [00:29:39] Or at least that's what he said. Right. That's the shtick that he's that's the persona that he's I don't know.

Ben [00:29:46] I believe it's accurate because when you read this stuff that he wrote, he is a business guy. He's a finance guy. It's very clear that he was very personable in real life. But when he the way he thinks about things is like then this had it had 12 gates and it had 47 bridges, and then we eat this and it was made out of had this much weight of marble on it and blah blah. He's just like he's a bean counter. Yeah. And he talks like he writes like a bean counter. But the kilo is like, I think I can spice this up a little bit.

Pat [00:30:19] Spice? Yeah.

Speaker 3 [00:30:20] Yeah.

Ben [00:30:21] And over the course of four years, they write this this the story of Markopolos adventures in China. And in 1299, the war between Genoa and Venice ends, and they're released and they go to publish it. And Marco Polo wants to call it called the Book Description of the World, which is a very Marco Polo thing that he would want to do. That's what he would want to call it. Rooster Keller decides he wants to call it the great Book of Marvels of the World. Right?

Pat [00:30:52] Yeah.

Ben [00:30:53] The Italians know it as the Millions Millionaire. Yeah, because that's that was Marco's nickname later on in life. And that's what they call the book is The Millions in in English. We just call it the travels of Marco Polo. But whatever the names, this blew everyone's minds. And it's what you said is written in an illuminated manuscript by a professional, by a bestselling romance author. This is the movie adaptation of Markopolos Life, written with with the author's help by a dude who is like, good at this phrase. And so when it comes out between the animal stuff and the travels and all like, so everything that comes out, this is like reading a sci fi story, right? It's like reading. It's like reading Gulliver's Travels, right? Right. For the later generation. Like, Yeah, like what? This. There's no way this exists in real life. And that's one thing I love about it. Everybody in the time period was like, This is bullshit. You hear all this shit, right? Like, there's no way this happened.

Pat [00:31:50] Like, this is comic book.

Ben [00:31:51] No way. You're totally, like, made up.

Pat [00:31:53] This is fantasy, right?

Ben [00:31:55] And even today, when we can Google image, search some of the stuff, like there's there's people who are like, no, he was lying because it said that like that Xanadu had 27 gates. But we know from the schematics that it actually had 25. So he's totally exaggerating. Probably even go there and it's like, okay, look, he is writing about things that he remembered from 17 years before, and it's being filtered through.

Pat [00:32:19] Another dude, a.

Ben [00:32:20] Bestselling fiction novelist. Yeah. And the original manuscript of this was written in a language called Franco Venetian, which was then translated into all these other languages, and things got lost in translation. And also the other translators interpreted their own stuff. Their entire passages appear in various translations of this book that don't appear in the original.

Pat [00:32:39] Yeah, And honestly, going specifically for like did have 25 gates or 27 gates. When you're talking about manuscripts, numbers are like the most likely to get messed up because they're just so arbitrary. You know, I don't.

Ben [00:32:52] Remember how old I am. Like half.

Pat [00:32:54] Same, same. Yeah.

Speaker 3 [00:32:55] Yeah.

Ben [00:32:56] Yeah.

Speaker 3 [00:32:57] Yeah.

Pat [00:32:59] Yeah.

Ben [00:32:59] I'm definitely not going to read. Like, if you ask me how many windows there are on the front of my house, I don't think I could tell you accurately. You know what I mean?

Pat [00:33:06] Like, seriously? Yeah.

Ben [00:33:08] Yeah. And Marco Polo is right about a lot of that stuff because he does remember these things because he is a bean counter.

Pat [00:33:14] Yes.

Ben [00:33:14] So he is right about a lot of this stuff. But like, they're like he didn't even mention the Great Wall of China and it's like he probably didn't go there.

Pat [00:33:19] Yeah. Or like also sometimes you don't mention the things that are just so friggin obvious.

Ben [00:33:26] Sure. He just didn't come up. We didn't think of it. He didn't write it down. The cello didn't think it was interesting. Yeah. So Marco Polo gets a lot of credit for like, oh, he, you know, introduced the West to China or like, he brought spaghetti back, which people think like, there's a long standing the urban legend. Like when he came back he brought a lo main with him and that became spaghetti like that's this is old right The Silk Road has existed forever. Like none of this stuff was. None of the things that he brought back were like the first time anybody had ever seen this thing. His contribution to Western civilization is this. He wrote like the first, like travel book on what's up in the East right now.

Pat [00:34:11] Yeah.

Ben [00:34:11] And people were like, Dude, this is awesome. I want to. Go there. And that inspired an entire future generation of explorers, which became the age of discovery, of like, how can we build a boat that will sail us there faster? How can we get here that doesn't involve walking through sandstorms or like riding on a camel through the Gobi Desert?

Pat [00:34:31] But this is how this is how Europeans got their legs stuck together to go discover the Americas. Right?

Ben [00:34:37] Exactly. Like they they were kind of insulated in a lot of the stuff that was written in this time period as religious related religious texts, things like that. Right. You know, maybe maybe there were people in Venice who wanted to go visit the Holy Land. But, you know, with the realm of Kublai Khan was not a yuan dynasty. China was not a very high priority on like the the wish list for life travel. Right. It wasn't on people's bucket lists. The season ended. Yeah. Until Marco Polo got back. It was like actually this is like the most awesome thing I've ever seen in my entire life. And the way he wrote about it and we described it. And so, yeah, so he kind of blows everybody's mind with this and like it helps he provide some contribution for like some early cartography. He brought maps back with them, which helped the Western world kind of create maps. It's kind of how we how we located where Japan is. Yeah. And some of the some of the Southeast Asian islands that that Marco Polo had visited, they weren't on any European maps. And there's a lot of contribution that he provides to the West that way. He also like, you know, one thing I had talked about him not being like a super religious kind of hard liner.

Pat [00:35:44] Yeah. Like he was open to other things, right?

Ben [00:35:47] And so he recorded other things, right? Like, I think if a if those Dominican monks had gone with him and had the same adventure as him and come back, they wouldn't have described the intricate details of the Buddhist religion. Right. Or the culture or the language or the the characters that they use. They don't use the alphabet. These characters. Right. There's all of these, you know, the kind of dress they wore and the way they spoke. And they're things that Marco Polo notes that maybe you a little bit more cultural and maybe wouldn't have been mentioned by somebody who was like, God, this is all heresy, right? Or this is all idolatry or whatever. And so, you know, I think he should get some credit for for that. And and, yeah, his discoveries kind of helped to kind of spark not just the renaissance in Italy, but also this age of discovery, age of exploration. All of these guys, the Vasco da Gama is and Columbus's and and the Magellan's, they've read Markopolos book and were like, you know, if not just the the lure of the amazingness of this realm and I want to see it, but hey, there's probably some money to be made here if we could get out there, right? Like also.

Pat [00:36:59] True.

Ben [00:36:59] Right? Even from a purely like, cynical point of view, like, hey.

Pat [00:37:02] Exploitative.

Ben [00:37:03] Right? If I can get out there and trade trade for some of this t like maybe I can make some money.

Pat [00:37:08] Yeah oh T.

Ben [00:37:11] And, and yeah. So that was his contribution was the book that he wrote that he didn't mean to write from adventures that he had, that he didn't grow up thinking he was going to have. He becomes this celebrity across the western world. Yeah he's rich and famous. He he's 45 when he gets out of jail and then he finally like he gets married for the first time. He he gets married. He has three daughters. He's wealthy, he's famous. He's the powerful Venetian merchant around him. And. Yeah, and he lives to be an old man and never goes back to China, because I think probably.

Pat [00:37:44] China's kind of a schlep.

Ben [00:37:46] It's a bit of a hike for him. And also there's a lot of people there that probably don't like it.

Pat [00:37:49] Where he.

Ben [00:37:51] Probably made some enemies. Well, who are going to be a little jealous of him being good friends with Kublai Khan. Yeah. And yeah, he dies. An old man in bed in June of 1324. His last words were, I have not told half of what I have seen.

Pat [00:38:07] Marco. Marco, you're home now.

Speaker 3 [00:38:10] Oh, yeah.

Ben [00:38:13] Yeah, I love him. He's just kind of this. Every man who goes on this adventure.

Pat [00:38:17] And very open minded every now. Yeah.

Ben [00:38:20] Which I think is awesome. Yeah. If you'd like to read any more about Marco Polo, I really encourage you to read his book in English. It's called The Travels of Marco Polo. It's very good and it gives you a really good insight into the guy that I think he might surprise you. It surprised me in a really good way. So, you know, he's very dry. He is a lot of nuts and bolts and numbers and long descriptions of things that you're like, get to the point, Marco. But it's worth reading because it's his own words and he dictated it himself, and it's only filtered through a few people who were trying to make it marketable. I also really enjoyed I read Marco Polo by Milton Rugoff, and there's a book called Marco Polo From Venice to Xanadu, by Laurence Berggren, which are both worth checking out, if nothing else, then because they kind of fact checked the travels of Marco Polo, his his, his autobiography. So you can check those out. And I encourage you to do so if you want to learn more about this guy. So anyway. That's our show for today. And thank you so much for listening. And we'll see you. We'll see you next week.

Pat [00:39:21] Badass of the Week is an iHeart radio podcast produced by High Five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Pat Larash, and Ben Thompson. Writing is by Pat and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs and Ali Lemer. Mixing and music and Sound Design is by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart. Badass of the Week is based on the website BadassoftheWeek.com, where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If you want to reach out with questions or ideas, you can email us at badasspodcast@badassoftheweek.com. If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen and tell your friends and your enemies if you want, as we'll be back next week with another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.