Few books have done more to shape the Western imagination of the wider world than Marco Polo’s account of his extraordinary journeys to the East — and this sparkling new translation brings that vision to life with fresh authority. Polo was the most celebrated traveller of his age, setting out in 1271 on a voyage that took him to China, where he went on to serve the Kublai Khan across a series of diplomatic missions. His return to the West brought an unexpected twist: captured as a prisoner of war, he encountered Rustichello of Pisa, and together the two men produced this landmark work. What emerges is a vivid portrait of a remote and long-vanished world — its unfamiliar religions, customs and societies; the spices and silks of the East; the precious gems, exotic vegetation and wild beasts of distant lands. The book revolutionized European understanding of the then unknown East and remains one of the greatest travel accounts ever written. For this edition — the first entirely new English translation of the Travels in more than fifty years — Nigel Cliff has returned to the original manuscript sources to produce a fresh and authoritative rendering of the text. Also included are invaluable editorial materials: an introduction that reconstructs the state of the world on the eve of Polo’s departure and examines the fantastical notions the West had formed about the East, evoking the journey’s full historical drama with colour and immediacy.
ISBN 13: 9780241253052
Author: Marco Polo
