Marco Polo

Marco Polo was born in 1254 into a Venetian merchant family. In 1271, at seventeen, he set out with his father and uncle along the Silk Road, and after three and a half years reached Shangdu, the summer capital of the Yuan, where he was received by Kublai Khan. By his own account he lived seventeen years in China, enjoyed the Khan's trust and was sent on missions throughout the empire. He returned to Venice in 1295, was soon captured in a sea battle between Venice and Genoa, and in prison dictated his recollections to a fellow prisoner, the writer Rustichello; this is The Travels of Marco Polo. He spent his last years as a merchant in Venice and died in 1324; it is said that on his deathbed, urged to retract his 'exaggerations', he replied, 'I have not told half of what I saw.'