Marco Polo’s amazing journey to China and his twenty-year odyssey to the ends of the earth is justly famous: his own terse but detailed record of what he saw has been a popular classic of travel literature ever since his death 650 years ago. But Marco’s story is more of a vast travel guide than a personal account; and Richard Humble feels that the personal side of Marco’s travels has been sadle neglected. It was – and remains – an epic of human adventure. 

          Marco met with so many trials and dangers in twenty-five years of constant travelling that the odds were heavily stacked against his ever getting home to his native Venice to tell the tale. Small wonder that when he did, the hard-headed Venetians of his day dismissed his stories as romantic exaggeration.

          Richard Humble has presented a new and thought-provoking account of Marco’s incredible wanderings – why he went in the first place, the frustrating setbacks and mortal danger that dogged the party on its long overland march to the Court of Kubilai Khan, Marco’s unique career in the Khan’s service, and his final eventful return to Europe long after his family had given him up for dead. The book is lavishly illustrated.