The Travels of Marco Polo by Marco Polo (Translated and with a Introduction by Ronald Latham)
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Overview: The Travels of Marco Polo by Marco Polo: 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.
MARCO POLO was born in 1254, the son of Niccolò Polo, a Venetian merchant. His father and uncle had already made one visit to China in 1260 when Marco joined them for the second journey in 1271. They spent the next twenty years travelling in the service of Kubilai Khan. There is evidence that Marco travelled extensively in the Mongol empire, and, although the course of his later travels is open to debate, it is fairly certain that he visited India and made at least one journey from Peking south-west as far as Burma. The Polos’ isolation from the West was not total, however, as there was some commerce with the West and an infiltration of Christianity; the barriers only came down again between East and West with the resurgence of Chinese nationalism c.1368. The Polos returned home to Venice by a long route in 1292, and in 1298/9 Marco was a prisoner of war at Genoa. It was probably in prison that he met Rustichello of Pisa, a romance-writer. Together they wrote The Travels; a product of an observant merchant and a professional romancer. Marco Polo died in 1324 and left the bulk of his possessions accrued on his travels to be divided between his three daughters.
RONALD LATHAM also translated Lucretius’ On the Nature of the Universe for Penguin Classics. Born in Northumberland in 1907, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, before being appointed Lecturer in Latin at Queen’s University Belfast. From 1934 until 1967, with the exception of the war years, he was an Assistant Keeper of the Public Records. Ronald Latham was an O.B.E. and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. His other publications include In Quest of Civilization and Finding Out About the Normans, and he edited the Revised Medieval Latin Word List from British and Irish Sources, in the British Academy series. He was also the original editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. He died in 1992.
Genre: General, Non-fiction, History, Travels
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