Great Travellers: Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta and Zheng He
Three journeys across the medieval world: a Venetian merchant at Kublai Khan's court, a Moroccan scholar's thirty years on the road from Mali to China, and the Ming admiral whose treasure fleets reached Arabia and East Africa.
Stop 01 · 1271
Marco Polo Sets Out: Venice to Hormuz
In 1271 Marco Polo, a Venetian of about seventeen, left for Asia with his father Niccolò and his uncle Maffeo. The two merchants had already met the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, who had asked them to bring back a hundred learned Christians and oil from the lamp in Jerusalem. They sailed to Acre, where the newly elected pope gave them letters for the Khan, landed at the port of Ayas and rode east across the Mongol Ilkhanate, by way of Tabriz and Kerman, to Hormuz on the Persian Gulf. They had meant to take ship there for China, but judged the local vessels unfit for the ocean and turned inland to go overland instead.
A commemorative plaque on the site of Casa Polo in Venice, part of the Teatro Malibran which was built upon Polo's houseDidier Descouens · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
In 1271 Marco Polo, a Venetian of about seventeen, left for Asia with his father Niccolò and his uncle Maffeo. The two merchants had already met the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, who had asked them to bring back a hundred learned Christians and oil from the lamp in Jerusalem. They sailed to Acre, where the newly elected pope gave them letters for the Khan, landed at the port of Ayas and rode east across the Mongol Ilkhanate, by way of Tabriz and Kerman, to Hormuz on the Persian Gulf. They had meant to take ship there for China, but judged the local vessels unfit for the ocean and turned inland to go overland instead.
From Hormuz the Polos struck north-east along the Silk Road. Marco's book praises Balkh as a noble seat of learning, mentions the rubies of Badakhshan, and describes Kashgar with its Nestorian Christian churches and Muslim Khotan, before the caravan crossed the Lop Desert. According to the book, bandits once fell on a caravan they had joined under cover of a sandstorm, killing or enslaving many of its members. Marco said he spent a year at Ganzhou, today's Zhangye. About three and a half years after leaving Venice, probably around 1275, the Polos were received by Kublai Khan at his summer capital, Shangdu, and handed over the pope's letters and the holy oil.
Marco said Kublai made him an envoy and sent him on missions across the empire and into Southeast Asia, and that he spent some 17 years in Yuan China. He described paper money, coal burned for fuel and ships built with watertight compartments. Some details match Chinese records, such as salt revenues and Christian churches at Zhenjiang, and the story of the princess Kököchin is confirmed by Persian and Chinese sources. Yet no Chinese document names him, and he never mentions the Great Wall, tea or chopsticks. In 1995 the historian Frances Wood argued he may never have gone further than Persia; scholars including Stephen Haw, Morris Rossabi and David Morgan have rejected her case.
Around 1291 Kublai let the Polos leave, on condition that they escort the Mongol princess Kököchin to Persia as a bride for its ruler, Arghun. The wedding party sailed from Zaitun (Quanzhou) in 14 junks, by way of Singapore, Sumatra and southern India, to Hormuz. The voyage took two years, and the book claims that only 18 of some 600 passengers survived. Arghun had died, so Kököchin married his son Ghazan. The Polos went overland to Trebizond on the Black Sea and reached Venice in 1295, 24 years after leaving. Later captured by the Genoese, Marco dictated his story to a fellow prisoner, the romance writer Rustichello da Pisa.
On 14 June 1325 Ibn Battuta, a 21-year-old from a family of legal scholars in Tangier, set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca. He would not see Morocco again for 24 years. He followed the North African coast through Tlemcen and Tunis to Alexandria and Cairo, detoured through Syria, and joined a caravan to Medina and Mecca, completing his first hajj in November 1326. Instead of going home he crossed Arabia to Iraq, went over the Zagros Mountains to Isfahan and Shiraz, saw Baghdad still partly ruined from the Mongol sack of 1258, and rode north to the trading city of Tabriz. Scholars note that some passages of his account were borrowed from earlier travellers.
Around 1330 he took to the sea. From Jeddah he worked slowly down the Red Sea in small boats of sewn planks, visited Yemen and sailed from Aden to Zeila on the Somali coast. At Mogadishu, then at the height of its wealth, he described a Somali sultan who spoke both Somali and Arabic, and fine cloth that was exported as far as Egypt. Further south lay the Swahili coast: a night at Mombasa, then Kilwa, an island town enriched by the gold trade, whose buildings and pious ruler, Sultan al-Hasan ibn Sulaiman, he admired. When the monsoon winds changed, he sailed north again by way of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz.
Seeking a post with Muhammad bin Tughluq, the wealthy Sultan of Delhi, Ibn Battuta took a roundabout road: across Anatolia, over the Black Sea to the Golden Horde, to Constantinople, then past the Caspian and Aral seas to Bukhara and Samarkand and over the Hindu Kush. He reached the Indus on 12 September 1333, and the sultan made him a judge. Sent as an envoy to China in 1341, he was stranded at Calicut when one ship sank and the other left without him. He served nine months as a judge in the Maldives, then sailed via Bengal and Sumatra to Quanzhou in 1345. Some scholars doubt he went deeper into China, or reached it at all.
He started home in 1346. In Syria in 1348 he met the Black Death, which by his account was killing 2,400 people a day in Damascus, and he reached Tangier in 1349 to learn that his mother had died months earlier. After a visit to Granada he made one last journey. In 1352 he crossed the Sahara by camel caravan, past the salt mines of Taghaza, worked by slaves, to Oualata and the court of Mansa Suleyman of Mali, whose customs he often judged harshly. He saw Timbuktu, then a small town, and Gao, and returned in 1354 with a caravan carrying 600 enslaved women. At his sultan's suggestion he then dictated his Rihla to the scholar Ibn Juzayy.
Zheng He was born Ma He in 1371 to a Muslim family in Yunnan. Captured as a boy by Ming armies in 1381, he was castrated and sent to serve the prince who later seized the throne as the Yongle Emperor. In 1405 the emperor sent him into the 'Western Ocean' with, according to the records, 317 ships, 62 of them great treasure ships, and some 27,800 men; how big the ships really were is still debated. Carrying silks and imperial letters, the fleet called at Champa, Java, Malacca and Sumatra, then crossed to Ceylon and Calicut. On the way home in 1407 it destroyed the pirate fleet of Chen Zuyi, who had seized Palembang.
The visits were not always peaceful. In 1411 King Alakeshvara of Kotte in Ceylon lured Zheng He inland while planning to attack his ships; Zheng's 2,000 soldiers seized the capital instead and carried the king to China as a captive. The fourth voyage, from 1413, sailed on to Hormuz; the fifth, from 1417, called at Aden, Mogadishu, Brava and Malindi, and envoys returning in 1419 brought giraffes, zebras and ostriches that caused a sensation at court. Chinese porcelain of the period has been dug up at those African ports. A last fleet sailed in 1431, and seven of its men reached Mecca. After 1433 the voyages ended, for reasons still debated, and Zheng He died in 1433 or 1435.