Pod Insights You're Dead to Me Marco Polo (Radio Edit) About this episode Greg Jenner is joined in 13th-Century Venice by Professor Sharon Kinoshita and comedian Ria Lina to learn all about medieval traveller Marco Polo and his adventures in China.
Born into a family of merchants, in 1271 a teenage Marco set out for the court of the Mongol emperor Qubilai Khan with his father and uncle. They would not return to Italy for nearly a quarter of a century. In the service of the emperor, the Polos saw all manner of extraordinary things – including the Mongols' amazing imperial postal service and diamond-hunting eagles in India.
Imprisoned by the Genoese on his eventual return, Polo spent his time in prison writing his Description of the World with the Arthurian romance author Rustichello, a travelogue describing his exploits in the East and the wonders he had seen. This episode explores Polo’s extraordinary life, the decades he spent travelling in China and beyond, and the fascinating account he wrote on his return.
This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.
Hosted by: Greg Jenner
Research by: Hannah Cusworth
Written by: Hannah Cusworth, Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner
Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner
Audio Producer: Steve Hankey
Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands
Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse
Executive Editor: Philip Sellars
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:12 Greg Jenner? Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are packing our trunk and boarding a ship to 13th century China to learn all about medieval traveller Marco Polo. And to help us on our way, we have two very special travelling companions. In history corner, she's distinguished professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on the intercultural relations of 12th and 13th century Asia and Europe, and in literature particularly. And luckily for us, she's the most recent translator of Marco Polo's book, as well as the author of Marco Polo and His World. It's Professor Sharon Kinoshita. Welcome Sharon.
1:52 Speaker 04 Thanks Greg, I'm delighted to be here.
1:54 Greg Jenner? We're delighted to have you here. And in comedy corner, she's a comedian, actor and writer. You might have seen her on loads of things on TV, including Live at the Apollo, QI, Pointless, Having the News For You, maybe you've seen her stand-up tour, Reawakening, or heard her on Radio 4's news quiz or The Now Show. And you will definitely remember her from our episode on Pirate Queen, Chung Yi Sao. It's Ria Lina, welcome back to the show, Ria. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. We're delighted to have you back. Now, Ria, you are, I think officially, the most educated, therefore most hyper-intelligent comedian we've ever had on. You have a PhD.
2:28 Speaker 05 I do have a PhD, but I don't know that that makes me the most.
2:30 Greg Jenner? The most educated perhaps, but.
2:32 Speaker 05 Okay, all right. The only one that didn't have an ADHD enough to be able to finish three degrees.
2:37 Greg Jenner? So is Marco Polo a familiar name?
2:40 Speaker 05 Very familiar name to me because I used to play it all the time at school.
2:45 Greg Jenner? Okay.
2:45 Speaker 05 Or in swimming.
2:46 Greg Jenner? Talk us through the rules.
2:47 Speaker 05 The rule is that you put on a blindfold and then everyone else that you're playing with has to avoid being tagged by you, but you get clues. And what you do is you say Marco and everyone has to say Polo when you say Marco so that you can get an idea of where they are.
3:01 Greg Jenner? You're echolocating.
3:02 Speaker 05 Yes.
3:03 Greg Jenner? Cartographically, is that how Marco Polo travelled the world, Sharon? Echolocating.
3:09 Speaker 04 You know, I have to continue my research because I haven't been able to unearth the foundational document for the swimming pool game.
3:17 Greg Jenner? So, what do you know?
3:24 Greg Jenner? This is the So What Do You Know, where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And you've probably heard of the name Marco Polo. Much like Ria, you may have known he was a medieval famous traveller. You may even have played the famous swimming pool game. Marco!
3:38 Speaker 05 Polo!
3:38 Greg Jenner? Thank you, Ria. Now sadly, this is a 20th century invention, not something that Marco did splashing around in the canals of Venice when he was a little boy. If you've travelled to Venice, oh, aren't you fancy? You will have flown to the Marco Polo Airport. You may have stayed in the Marco Polo Hotel. He's been the subject of a Netflix series. If you're a diehard Doctor Who fan and you've seen the original 1960s mini-series, you'll know that Marco Polo's in there too. He gets around, this famous traveller. But what was the real historical story behind the big name? Did Marco Polo really go to China? And why is there a sheep named after him? Let's find out. Professor Sharon, can we start at the beginning? When was Marco Polo born? And what was his family situation like? Was he wealthy? Is he born into privilege?
4:20 Speaker 04 Well, he was born in 1254, so mid 13th century, into a merchant family of Venice. But we don't know very much about his childhood. But to be fair, in the Middle Ages, even future kings leave little to no trace in the historical record.
4:36 Greg Jenner? Right. So we know he was born in 1254. And that's it.
4:41 Speaker 04 That's right.
4:42 Greg Jenner? Helpful. I'll turn to you, Ria. What do you imagine his childhood was like in medieval Venice before little Bambino Marco was splashing around in the canals?
4:51 Speaker 05 I have to say, that really helps place things for me, because I don't know how old Venice is.
4:55 Greg Jenner? Oh.
4:55 Speaker 05 But it's at least as old as the 1200s. Right? Because at some point, they would have had to build all those canals.
5:01 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
5:01 Speaker 05 Right? So it wasn't there in marshy times, which is an official time period, by the way, if you didn't know that.
5:07 Greg Jenner? The marshy era.
5:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, there's the Iron Age and the marshy times.
5:13 Speaker 05 But I can imagine that, okay, so Italy in the 1200s was a fascinating place. I know that, for example, there was a medical school in Salerno that taught both men and women, so I think it's more modern than we would think it would be in the 1200s. And him being born to a merchant family, right there, it was a big dock, wasn't it, Venice?
5:33 Greg Jenner? It was.
5:33 Speaker 05 And all the ships went from there to all over the world. So I think that he was really well-placed to be an explorer, better than, say, a sheep farmer in the Alps.
5:45 Speaker 04 Well, that's fantastic, Ria, yeah. The marsh era, indeed.
5:51 Speaker 04 Venice, in fact, was founded several centuries before by refugees who were fleeing those Germanic invasions. And, you know, they came across a bunch of marshy little islands, and they figured the barbarians are not going to follow us here. But by the 13th century, Venice was a really big, important maritime republic, making its fortune from traveling the seas and bringing luxury stuff back to Venice and funneling through Venice to the rest of the world. And, you know, Venice really got its start with the First Crusade in 1099, and they developed a transport business, shipping people back and forth to the Holy Land, you
6:36 Speaker 04 know, along with all that merchandise, the silk, spices, the good things like that.
6:41 Greg Jenner? So we call this the Silk Road. Despite it being seas, the Silk Road is this trade network.
6:46 Speaker 05 Wow, this is the original Silk Road.
6:48 Greg Jenner? Yeah, so that's Venice. Sharon, tell us about Polo's family relations. Do we know of his siblings, mother, father?
6:55 Speaker 04 We don't know too much about the family of his generation yet, although...
7:01 Speaker 04 We know a lot, well, we know a relative a lot about his father Niccolo and his uncle Maffeo, because they took off to the east and they actually travelled to the court of the Mongols a decade before Marco went with them. So when Marco set out, the Polos were, you know, a merchant family, but they were certainly not part of that upper crust that furnished the dynasties of doges and so forth. So all we know about them really is what Marco and his co-author tell us in the prologue, the first nineteen chapters of their book.
7:38 Greg Jenner? So Ria, Marco grew up not really seeing his dad or his uncle because they were off gallivanting around Western Asia. And then suddenly, one day, they came back and they came back with a message for the Pope from the Mongol emperor. But daddy makes it up to little Marco by saying, I've come back, I've delivered my message to the Pope, and actually, I quite fancy going back out again. Do you want to come?
8:02 Speaker 05 Well, he's old enough by then. But also, imagine knowing that your dad is so close to home and then he goes, sorry, I have to just detour for a couple of months to see the Pope. I'll be right back. That's just...
8:13 Greg Jenner? So the Polos now, or pack of Polos, let's call them that. So Maffeo, Niccolo, and Marco, they head back out to Mongol China in 1271. Marco is a young, he's what, seventeen, eighteen? He's a young man.
8:24 Speaker 04 That's right.
8:25 Greg Jenner? And they travel to Eka, which is in the Holy Land of what we now call the Middle East. And they definitely go to China, Sharon, because I, when I was a student about twenty years ago or something like that, there was a big sort of like, ooh, did he really go to China? Did he make it up? Was he telling stories? But he definitely went to China, right?
8:41 Speaker 04 He definitely went to China.
8:43 Greg Jenner? Okay, case closed.
8:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. On the other hand, I should say, Greg, that if you asked Marco, had he been to China, he might have looked at you with puzzlement for, you know, a split second, because I think for Marco and his family... They were traveling not to China, but to the court of the Great Khan. So they were traveling in the Mongol Empire. When the Polos first arrived there, the Mongols ruled what we would consider now northern China, because they had conquered that from the dynasty, the previous dynasty ruling it. And it wasn't until the Polos had been at the court of the Great Khan for half a decade or so, that Kublai completed his conquest of what we would now call southern China,
9:30 Speaker 04 which was the Empire of the Southern Sung. So this had the effect of uniting the territories that hadn't been unified under single rule for a few centuries there, but which basically corresponds to our modern nation-state of China. So the Polos were actually on the scene for this big turning point in world history.
9:52 Greg Jenner? Listeners, if you want to know more about the Mongols, we did one, an episode on Chinggis Khan, who grandfather of Kubla Khan, or Chinggis Khan, I guess more famous name, but Chinggis is what we called him. He's there, he's quite impressed by Kubla Khan and the capital Dadoo or Khanbalik. Do you want to guess how long the Polos stay in this part of the world?
10:11 Speaker 05 On this trip?
10:12 Greg Jenner? Well, let's call it a trip, but it's quite a long trip.
10:15 Speaker 05 Let's go 20 years.
10:16 Greg Jenner? That's a really good guess, it's 24 years.
10:18 Speaker 05 Yes.
10:19 Greg Jenner? So you've done very well, you're very good at this, Ria, you've got incredible knowledge here.
10:22 Speaker 05 No, no, pulling it from I don't know where.
10:25 Greg Jenner? Well, amazing, but yeah, they're there for 24 years. And Sharon, we get a sense then that Marco Polo, even though he arrives as a 17-year-old, he becomes a man in China, in Mongol-controlled China. What does he tell us about his life in Mongol China?
10:40 Speaker 04 Well, he tells us basically zero.
10:44 Greg Jenner? 24 years, Marco, come on.
10:46 Speaker 05 He's too busy having fun.
10:49 Greg Jenner? You talked about a book, what have we got?
10:51 Speaker 04 Well, I mean, we know his book today generally as Marco Polo's Travels. And when you see that travels on the title, you know, what are you expecting? You're expecting to hear about somebody's travels. But actually, the first versions of Marco's book were called not the travels, but the description of the world. So, of course, that title puts emphasis not on Marco, the traveler, but the world that he came to know. So the book consists of 233 chapters, some of them really short, some of them longer. But only 19 of those 233 chapters are devoted to a kind of overview of all three of them
11:36 Speaker 04 going to Asia and back. The rest of the chapters are really about the places, sometimes in formulaic and kind of tedious fashion of just, there's this place, and then three days' journey later, there's this place, and then five days after that, there's this place. You know, sometimes modern readers who pick up the book are a little bit surprised and maybe just a tad disappointed.
12:01 Speaker 05 You know, I'm beginning to wonder whether his dad made him go to his room and just write down what happened today. And he's like, today we went to place A, and tomorrow we're going to place B. Did it!
12:11 Greg Jenner? Sharon, Marco Polo tells us some really interesting things about, you know, life in the Mongol court, but also kind of wider administrative aspects. And two of the things I think that are particularly interesting would be the postal system.
12:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, I can't, I have to say, I did not expect to be this excited about the wider administrative organization.
12:31 Greg Jenner? Welcome to the nerd show over here.
12:33 Speaker 05 Wow. And you gave me a notebook and pen. I'm writing this down.
12:36 Greg Jenner? I did, I did. You know, this is what, we knew you were coming in, we thought we'd go fully nerd. Sharon, the postal system and paper money are two things that Polo is particularly intrigued by. These aren't brand new inventions, but these are things the Mongol dynasty are renowned for. So can you talk us through them?
12:52 Speaker 04 Right, okay, the postal system. Yeah, and so your American listeners would recognize this as a medieval model for the Pony Express.
13:02 Greg Jenner? Ah, yeah.
13:03 Speaker 04 But actually, yeah, the Mongol system was called the Yam, and it had many precedents in the ancient and medieval worlds, China, Persia, and elsewhere. But of course, the Mongol Empire was vaster than any of those, so the distances we're talking about were much greater. Horses, or sometimes just runners, depending on the terrain, would be posted at stations every, we don't know, maybe three miles or so. By relaying like this, they could cover, let's say, 10 days' journey for normal travelers in a day and a night, Marco tells us.
13:41 Greg Jenner? Tell us about paper money, because Marco Polo is particularly fascinated, because paper money is not in use in Europe, is it, at this time?
13:47 Speaker 04 Oh, no. I mean, so the idea that you had money that was good, you know, over the vast stretch of empire is just mind-blowing. But also mind-blowing is the idea that anyone would look at a piece of paper and think that you could buy anything with it, that, you know, it had any worth at all.
14:05 Greg Jenner? Amazing. Let's move on to something even shinier than paper money, which is jewels.
14:10 Speaker 05 Ooh.
14:10 Greg Jenner? Shiny, shiny jewels. Marco Polo listed three techniques for unearthing natural diamonds in India, interestingly enough. Can you guess what these techniques might have been? I'll give you a clue, Ria. One of them involves eagles.
14:22 Speaker 05 What?
14:22 Greg Jenner? The big flappy birds.
14:23 Speaker 05 Sorry, three techniques for getting jewels.
14:26 Greg Jenner? For finding jewels, for diamonds.
14:27 Speaker 05 Finding diamonds, okay. One of them is take it off of someone else who's already got some.
14:30 Greg Jenner? That's definitely a technique, sure.
14:33 Speaker 05 The second one is dig for them where they're made in the earth.
14:37 Greg Jenner? That's a very sensible technique, yeah.
14:39 Speaker 05 And then the third one is train your eagle.
14:43 Speaker 05 To pick them out of magpie nests.
14:47 Greg Jenner? I like that. That's a very smart.
14:49 Speaker 05 I think that those are my three highly informed decisions. Ask me how many diamonds I have.
14:55 Greg Jenner? How many diamonds?
14:56 Speaker 05 None. None. None of those worked for me.
14:58 Greg Jenner? Sorry. Sorry to hear that. Sharon, is Ria about to be a very, very wealthy person with her diamond industry?
15:05 Speaker 04 I think she was pretty close. So Marco Polo tells us.
15:08 Speaker 05 Yes.
15:10 Speaker 04 Marco Polo tells us about the way diamonds were collected in the province of Motopali on the east coast of India. So the diamonds were located in the mountains. So you let the rain wash them to the surface. Then in the dry season, you can go in and collect them in the gorges and the caverns. So on the one hand, you can just pick them up. But on the other hand, in the caverns, there are poisonous snakes there that are function as a deterrent.
15:42 Greg Jenner? Right.
15:43 Speaker 04 So but more interestingly, they took pieces of meat into the cavern and they threw them in. So the diamonds would stick to the meat. Then eagles come and grab the meat. So you can either chase the eagles off and grab the diamond studded meat. Or if the eagles had already eaten the meat, just wait for the diamonds to come out the other end.
16:09 Speaker 05 Honestly, at this point, it is easier to just go and take them off of somebody else. I'm not endorsing that. I'm not endorsing that as a method. I'm just saying it just strikes me as easier.
16:18 Greg Jenner? Yeah, arguably, that's not mining. That's theft. But sure, sure. Okay.
16:22 Speaker 05 Well, we didn't pick up. We didn't say mining, did we? We didn't say how we're going to mine.
16:26 Greg Jenner? Maybe I didn't. Maybe I didn't. Okay, fair enough.
16:28 Speaker 05 In fact, technically, none of those are mining.
16:31 Greg Jenner? Sharon, I think at the top of the show, we mentioned Marco Polo sheep, which sounds delightful. What's that about?
16:40 Speaker 04 Well, you know, Marco surprisingly often waxes lyrical about a region's animal life. And in the Palmyra Mountains, the highest place in the world, he finds very large wild sheep with huge horns from which, as he tells us, shepherds made big bowls that they eat from. So today, these sheep are drawing the attention both of big game hunters on the one hand and environmentalists on the other. And we know them as Marco Polo sheep.
17:12 Greg Jenner? Ah, that's fantastic.
17:14 Speaker 05 I thought they had a hole in the middle.
17:15 Greg Jenner? Yes. He talks about luxury goods that were very valuable back in Europe and in the wider world that were from the animal kingdom. Ria, if I say to you ambergris and musk, do you know what those two things are?
17:31 Speaker 05 Whale vomit.
17:32 Greg Jenner? It is.
17:33 Speaker 05 Whale vomit.
17:34 Greg Jenner? I didn't know there was a song, but yes.
17:37 Speaker 05 There is now. Ambergris doesn't smell. It's funny that we use it for perfumes.
17:42 Greg Jenner? Yeah, we do.
17:43 Speaker 05 Because it doesn't smell nice.
17:44 Greg Jenner? No.
17:45 Speaker 05 But it is this horrendous, yellowy kind of gelatinous, maybe? Well, I don't know if that's quite the right term, that can wash up. But if you find any on a beach.
17:54 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
17:55 Speaker 05 Like, that sells for good money.
17:56 Greg Jenner? It's quid's in, isn't it? Yeah, it's tens of thousands of pounds. Yes, it's whale phlegm. And so ambergris was very luxurious, used in perfumes, as you say. Musk was extracted from the anal glands of certain types of deer, I believe, Sharon. Is that correct?
18:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, deer and oxen, I guess. And it's no accident that Marco Polo really pays attention to these because the Polo seem to have traded in musk. And after they returned to Venice, a good part of their increased fortune, we think, came from their trafficking in musk. So an animal secretion, again, valued in the making of perfume.
18:34 Greg Jenner? And his final mission at the end of these 24 years is to escort a bride quite a long way, Sharon. Is this a sort of fairy tale occasion? Is this a big royal wedding? Is it Harry and Meghan, Mark II?
18:47 Speaker 04 So Kubalai's great nephew, who is the... Ilhan, the subkan of Persia, sent a request to uncle saying, you know, my chief wife has died. I would like another bride from her same tribe. Can you send me one? So Kublai assembled a huge escort wedding party. And we can just imagine the polos jumping forward to ask to be included in this imperial party because this was a chance for them to sail back in the direction of Venice, anyway, after so many years with the great Khan.
19:22 Greg Jenner? And they get back to Venice in 1295. Do the polos get off the boat and everyone's like, oh, where have you been?
19:28 Speaker 04 Well, I hope they got a warm welcome at home.
19:32 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
19:33 Speaker 04 But in fact, you know, Marco stepped very quickly into Venice's political conflicts, et cetera, all around the Mediterranean. So we're not really sure what happened when he got home. But within four years, he was in jail in Genoa. So they're the great rivals of the Venetians. And so, yeah, he found himself in the year 1298, cooped up with other prisoners. And this is when and how the book got first written down.
20:05 Greg Jenner? Okay, so he's in a Genoese prison. He has survived 24 years in the court of the terrifyingly, you know, famously fearsome Kublai Khan. He has survived thousands of miles of voyages. He's survived everything you can. He gets back home and four years later, he's in jail. It's not ideal. It's quite bad luck.
20:20 Speaker 05 I mean, I'm hearing white privilege. That's what I'm hearing. That's what saved. He was probably due jail for 24 years over there. But they just went.
20:29 Greg Jenner? He was just coasting around going, hello, hello, hello.
20:31 Speaker 05 And he comes back, everyone's white. He's like, wait a minute.
20:35 Greg Jenner? So unlucky for him. Lucky for us, though, because Sharon, we get the book because his cellmate is a renowned writer. But with a lovely name, Rusticello.
20:45 Speaker 05 Oh.
20:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, from Pisa, because Pisa was another one of Jenna was trade rivals. And we know of Rusticello because he wrote in Arthurian Romance. And so the two teamed up. Actually, in the book, when you have I or we, it's often Rusticello talking, not Marco.
21:05 Greg Jenner? Are they co-authors?
21:06 Speaker 04 They are. We would call them co-authors. And I guess we would be tempted to call Rusticello a kind of ghostwriter. But unlike modern ghostwriters, he doesn't disappear into the background. He's like front and center. Saying, you know, I, Rusticello of Pisa, got Marco to tell me these stories and I'm writing them down.
21:26 Greg Jenner? Fair enough.
21:27 Speaker 05 Any excuse to insert yourself, right?
21:30 Greg Jenner? Yeah, yeah. Well, why not? You know, you've gone through the hard work of all that scribbling in the cell. You know, it's probably not very good lighting.
21:36 Speaker 05 It wasn't just the scribbling. He got him to tell the stories.
21:39 Greg Jenner? That's the truth. That's the other thing, isn't it? He extracted these stories from him. Okay. And the book, as you said earlier, Sharon, is not called Travels of Marco Perlo. It is called Description of the World, composed in 1298. But who's it for, this book? Is he just dotting down his memories because, you know, he doesn't want them to get lost? Or is he got an audience? Is there someone he intends it for? Is this his way of getting out of prison?
22:00 Speaker 04 Well, Rusticello's prologue starts out by addressing emperors and kings, dukes and marquise, counts, knights, townsfolk, all of you who wish to know the diverse regions of the world. So, you know, this is like a, an act of social imagining that corresponds to no actual audience that you could have had in the Middle Ages. And it's pretty unique. The only, it really strongly echoes the beginning of Rusticello's One Romance, where, you know, he's trying to get the biggest readership possible.
22:34 Greg Jenner? Okay. When you start with kings, you're definitely aiming high. But then by the end, he's like, townspeople, anyone, whoever is nearby.
22:41 Speaker 04 Hey, you.
22:43 Greg Jenner? Please read my book. Okay. And so he calls it Description of the World because he's seen the world. So it's quite a grand title. He's kind of showing off a bit.
22:53 Speaker 05 Well, I question who picked the title at this point. I feel like Rusticello really had a lot of sway in the making of this book. He's like, first of all, we're going to write it in French.
23:04 Speaker 05 Second of all, I'm in this book. I didn't go on the trip for 24 years, but I'm in the book. Third of all, it's going to be read by everybody. So I don't know that Marco Polo had much say in what it was going to be called.
23:18 Greg Jenner? Okay. He is released from prison eventually. Presumably, they're like, oh, all right, the war's over, off you go. What does he do with his time? Does he settle down? Does he marry? Does he start a different career?
23:31 Speaker 04 He marries, and actually, he marries well above his station. So we start to see, you know, the profit that he's getting, probably from the Musk trade. He marries very well. He has a couple of daughters who also marry very well, above the Polo's original social status. And then we really don't know much more than that. We have a couple of contracts, mainly having to do with Musk. And then he dies in 1324, aged 70, a ripe old age for those days.
24:04 Greg Jenner? What was the name of his wife?
24:06 Speaker 04 Donata Baduer.
24:08 Greg Jenner? Lovely. So he died in 1324, aged 70. And his travel book outlived him because, of course, you have translated it and it's well-known. And as Ria said, people were shouting his name in swimming pools around the 20th century. So can you tell us about the book? This fantastic, extraordinary document. How did it outlive him? And how did it spread through Europe?
24:32 Speaker 04 Well, this was a bestseller in the Middle Ages if you judge by the number of manuscripts. It survived. But most of them survived because the book was fairly rapidly translated into Latin by a Dominican friar. And it's that Latin copy that then gets retranslated into a bunch of languages, back into Italian dialects, but also, you know, further on into Northern European languages.
25:07 Greg Jenner? This is the part of the show where Ria and I sit quietly and study our navigation charts while Professor Sharon has two minutes to tell us something we need to know about Marco Polo. My stopwatch is ready, so Professor Sharon, please take it away.
25:19 Speaker 04 Okay, thanks Greg. What I'd like to emphasise, I think, is how surprising Marco Polo's book is on so many levels. So we've already touched on the point that it was written not as a travel narrative and that despite being authored by two Italians, it was composed in, not in Italian, but in French. But in his own time, Marco Polo was a real mythbuster. One spectacular example is when he tells his readers that, now hang on, unicorns are not at all as they are described in contemporary vestiaries and encyclopedias, but along with that single horn protruding from their forehead, they, as he says, have hair like buffaloes
26:01 Speaker 04 and feet like elephants. What he's describing, of course, is a rhinoceros, which, as he emphasises decidedly, does not let itself be captured by a virgin. At least as wondrous, I think, is the way Marco identifies the many sites across South, South East and East Asia that are sources of the spices, especially pepper, but also cloves, nutmeg, galangal and other exotic commodities that European merchants like himself would previously have accessed only at Mediterranean ports such as Akhe or Alexandria. What might read to
26:41 Speaker 04 us like that tedious repetition would have held the fascination of secret intel, I think, for his compatriots. Now, for modern readers, it's often astonishing to see Marco recount customs like polygamy, cremation, even anthropophagy with equanimity, even though they would have been unspeakably shocking to Latin Christians back home. His book lacks any divisions of the world and its peoples into capital E east or capital W west, and he makes no mention of the old world continents, Asia, Africa and Europe, that are the staple of Latin European cartography of the time.
27:24 Speaker 04 His "idolaters" lumps together peoples we would today identify as Buddhists, Confucians, Hindus, animists and so forth, but they are not bad unless they attack merchants. So these are just some surprising aspects of Marco Polo's book, but I think we need to recognise that this was a voice in the Middle Ages that can strike us as surprisingly modern, and that's why I think Marco Polo is just such a wonderful subject for rediscovery. Thank you.
28:00 Greg Jenner? Amazing, thank you Sharon, thank you so much. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we have the spectacular Professor Sharon Kinoshita from UC Santa Cruz. Thank you Sharon.
28:10 Speaker 04 Thanks Greg, I had a great time.
28:11 Greg Jenner? It was wonderful having you on.
28:12 Speaker 04 Thank you, that was wonderful.
28:13 Greg Jenner? Yeah, it was absolutely fascinating. In Comedy Corner, we have the sensational Ria Lina. Thank you Ria.
28:17 Speaker 05 No, thank you for having me.
28:19 Greg Jenner? It's been a delight. I've learned all about eagle poo and diamonds and all sorts.
28:23 Speaker 05 Eagle guano.
28:24 Greg Jenner? Join me next time as we navigate more historical wonders, but for now, I'm off to go and train a bunch of eagles, then chuck some juicy steaks into my local jewellers. I'm gonna be rich. Bye.
28:39 Speaker 03 I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4, I'm back with a brand new series of History's Secret Heroes. And he tells her that she will be sent to France as a secret agent, she will work undercover, and if she is caught, she's going to be shot. Join me for more stories of unsung heroes, acts of resistance, deception and courage from World War Two. Subscribe to History's Secret Heroes on BBC Sounds.
29:17 Speaker 06 Welcome to The Haunted Library.
29:20 Speaker 06 Join me, Colin Morgan, as I read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. A story of science and ambition, loneliness and longing, and what it truly means to be human.
29:36 Speaker 06 Listen to The Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts, or find us on YouTube.
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