Travels Of Marco Polo Quotes

Each time I say good-bye to a place I like, I feel like I am leaving a part of me behind. I guess whether we choose to travel as much as Marco Polo did or stay in the same spot from cradle to grave, life is a sequence of births and deaths. Moments are born and moments die. For new experiences to come to light, old ones need to wither away.

When Marco Polo came at last to Cathay, seven hundred years ago, did he not feel--and did his heart not falter as he realized--that this great and splendid capital of an empire had had its being all the years of his life and far longer, and that he had been ignorant of it? That it was in need of nothing from him, from Venice, from Europe? That it was full of wonders beyond his understanding? That his arrival was a matter of no importance whatever? We know that he felt these things, and so has many a traveler in foreign parts who did not know what he was going to find. There is nothing that cuts you down to size like coming to some strange and marvelous place where no one even stops to notice that you stare about you.

The map of the world is drawn by travelers and nomads. Built into it are steps, nights and days, stations and encounters.

The personal appearance of the Great Kaan, Lord of Lords, whose name is Cublay, is such as I shall now tell you.

You will hear it for yourself, and it will surely fill you with wonder.

Marco Polo dictated his Travels in French,

We go naked because we want nothing of this world; for we came into the world naked and unclothed. As for not being ashamed to show our members, the fact is that we do no sin with them and therefore have no more shame in them than you have when you show your hand or face or the other parts of your body that do not lead you into carnal sin; whereas you use your members to commit sin and lechery, and so you cover them up and are ashamed of them. But we are no more ashamed of showing them than we are of showing our fingers, because we do not sin with them.

to my father’s amazement, was an ancient but clearly recognizable painting of Marco Polo, who must have visited Huai’an during his thirteenth-century travels about China. The priest asked my father to donate a picture of Jesus for his collection, and, after thinking about it, Daddy did.

When Ferdinand Magellan attempted his circumnavigation of the globe in the sixteenth century, he had to assure his nervous, uneducated mariners that they would not in fact fall off the edge of the earth.

I wish I were rich enough to endow a prize for the sensible traveler: £10,000 for the first man to over Marco Polo’s outward route, reading three fresh books a week, and another £10,000 if he a drinks a bottle of wine a day as well. That man might tell one something about the journey. He might or might not be naturally observant. But at least he would use what eyes he had, and would not think it necessary to dress up the result in thrills that never happened and science no deeper than its own jargon.

All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

We travelled with a bookshelf fixed above the back of our seat. The poor books were shaken madly during all these days, but we rejoiced to be able to lay our hand on the right volume at the right moment. Rubbing against each other were Marco Polo, Pelliot, Evans-Wentz, Vivekananda, Maritain, Jung, a life of Alexander the Great, Grousset, the Zend-Avesta. I picked The Darvishes by John P. Brown and H. A. Rose, and read aloud a passage about Jalal-ud-din Rumi.

But beyond the extravagance of Rome's wealthiest citizens and flamboyant gourmands, a more restrained cuisine emerged for the masses: breads baked with emmer wheat; polenta made from ground barley; cheese, fresh and aged, made from the milk of cows and sheep; pork sausages and cured meats; vegetables grown in the fertile soil along the Tiber. In these staples, more than the spice-rubbed game and wine-soaked feasts of Apicius and his ilk, we see the earliest signs of Italian cuisine taking shape. The pillars of Italian cuisine, like the pillars of the Pantheon, are indeed old and sturdy. The arrival of pasta to Italy is a subject of deep, rancorous debate, but despite the legend that Marco Polo returned from his trip to Asia with ramen noodles in his satchel, historians believe that pasta has been eaten on the Italian peninsula since at least the Etruscan time. Pizza as we know it didn't hit the streets of Naples until the seventeenth century, when Old World tomato and, eventually, cheese, but the foundations were forged in the fires of Pompeii, where archaeologists have discovered 2,000-year-old ovens of the same size and shape as the modern wood-burning oven. Sheep's- and cow's-milk cheeses sold in the daily markets of ancient Rome were crude precursors of pecorino and Parmesan, cheeses that literally and figuratively hold vast swaths of Italian cuisine together. Olives and wine were fundamental for rich and poor alike.

Memory of the elderly monk survived in the accounts of some of the greatest leaders in medieval Europe, along with lengthy accounts in the Vatican archives, but he was soon forgotten in the West and in his homeland of China.

Bar Sauma strengthened diplomatic and political channels in his attempts to build an East-West military alliance, and his efforts reopened the lines of communication throughout the post-Roman world at a time when the Crusades had compromised the resources of the Europe’s leading monarchies. His efforts also opened up new communication and trade channels between European and Middle East/Asian states.

Genghis and his immediate descendants killed upwards of 40 million people, causing millions of acres of farmland to go untended and return to the wild. This massive destruction caused global carbon levels to plummet and the first and only case of man-made global cooling.

In August 1519, Magellan disembarked with a crew of 280 men among the five ships of his fleet: the Concepción, the San Antonio, the Santiago, the Victoria, and the flagship Trinidad. Four of the ships were three- or four-masted sailing ships called carracks; the Trinidad was a caravel. Each vessel held massive stores of supplies to last the men for weeks and months at sea, with plans to resupply in stops along the Canary Islands, Cape Verde, and South American port towns. No shipping clerk could have guessed how much they dangerously underestimated the needs of the voyage.

Richard Francis Burton was a British consul, Orientalist, explorer, best known today for translating the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra into English. He was the most educated explorer of the Victorian age, a time when only men of rough disposition set out to discover foreign lands, in stark contrast to the landed gentry, who were uninterested in international travel, unless it was in the comfort of a steamship to go administer a colony for the sake of the Crown or as a military officer deployed to extend the global landholdings of the British Empire. He

He spoke 29 languages, including Greek, Arabic, Persian, Icelandic, Turkish, Swahili, Hindi, and a host of other European, Asian, and African tongues.

We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live.

Abu Abdullah Ibn Battuta came from a prominent family of judges who studied thick tomes of Islamic law and wrote legally binding opinions on how to live out the law in daily life.

The 21-year-old set off for his journey the year before he died in 1324. Yet even though he traveled three times as far as Polo, crossing Africa, Asia, and China, Ibn Battuta has not received the same recognition. His memoirs, the Rihla (The Journey) was not translated into European languages until the nineteenth century and was unknown to Westerners except for the occasional Oriental scholar. Its full title is A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling. Despite its lofty appellation, his work lives up

The point here is not that Marco Polo should thus be seen in a good light, according to leftist expectations. It is rather that the ‘Orientalist’ charge is wrong, and that this Italian of the Middle Ages was a typical European in showing greater curiosity about other cultures, while exhibiting a unique European disposition to seek out and learn about the world. By contrast, Larner judges that Ibn Battuta’s tale ‘is not a geography like Marco’s work, but essentially an autobiography.’ Visiting unknown or unfamiliar lands, writing about the ways of others, was not Ibn Battuta’s ‘overriding impulse’; rather, it was to visit ‘illustrious sanctuaries’[40] in the Muslim world. He makes the crucial point that Ibn Battuta ‘is always at home’ in his travels, ‘wherever he goes he is in the House of Islam’.

One does not fulfill one's potential by listening to Scheherazade in a gilded hall, or by reading the Odyssey in one's den. One does so by setting forth into the vast unknown - just like Marco Polo when he traveled to China, or Columbus when he traveled to America.

Opening European Trade with Asia Marco Polo was an Italian merchant whose travels introduced Europeans to Central Asia and China. In the 13th century the traditional trade route leading to China was overland, traveling through the Middle East from the countries of Europe. Marco Polo established this trade route but it required ships to carry the heavy loads of silks and spices. Returning to Italy after 24 he found Venice at war with Genoa. In 1299, after having been imprisoned, his cell-mate recorded his experiences in the book “The Travels of Marco Polo.” Upon his release he became a wealthy merchant, married, and had three children. He died in 1324 and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Venice. Henry the Navigator charted the course from Portugal to the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa and is given credit for having started the Age of Discoveries. During the first half of the 15th century he explored the coast of West Africa and the islands of the Atlantic Ocean, in search of better routes to Asia. Five years after Columbus discovered the West Indies, Vasco da Gama rounded the southern point of Africa and discovered a sea route to India. In 1497, on his first voyage he opened European trade with Asia by an ocean route. Because of the immense distance around Africa, this passage became the longest sea voyage made at the time.

Yezd, in pre-Mahomedan times, was a great sanctuary of the Gueber worship, though now it is a seat of fanatical Mahomedanism. It is, however, one of the few places where the old religion lingers. In 1859 there were reckoned 850 families of Guebers in Yezd

Yezd is still a place of important trade, and carries on a thriving commerce with India by Bandar Abbási. A visitor in the end of 1865 says: "The external trade appears to be very considerable, and the merchants of Yezd are reputed to be amongst the most enterprising and respectable of their class in Persia. Some of their agents have lately gone, not only to Bombay, but to the Mauritius, Java, and China.

and in the preparation of those ingredients along with which it is fused to obtain that kind of soft Iron which is usually styled Indian Steel (HINDIAH).[3] They also have workshops wherein are forged the most famous sabres in the world…. It is impossible to find anything to surpass the edge that you get from Indian Steel (al-hadíd al-Hindí).

Indikou sidaérou], "On the Tempering of Indian Steel." Edrisi says on this subject: "The Hindus excel in the manufacture of iron,

You are the explosion of carnations in a dark room. Or the unexpected scent of pine miles from the woods of Maine. You are a full moon that gives midnight it's meaning. And the explanation of water For all living things. You are a compass, a sapphire, a bookmark. A rare coin, a smooth stone, a marble. You are an old lore, a small shell, a saved silver dollar. You are a fine quartz, a feathered quill, and a fob from a favorite watch. You are a valentine tattered and loved and reread a hundred times. You are a medal found in the drawer of a once sung hero. You are honey, and cinnamon and West Indies spices, lost from the boat that was once Marco Polo's. You are a pressed rose, a pearl ring, and a red perfume bottle found near the Nile. You are an old soul from an ancient place a thousand years, and centuries and millenniums ago. And you have traveled all this way just so I could love you. I do.

Marco Polo’s father, Niccolò Polo, traded with the Persians who were known to the early Europeans. These early Persians came from the province of Fârs, sometimes known in Old Persian as Pârsâ, located in the southwestern region of Iran. As a people, they were united under the Achaemenid Dynasty in the 6th century BC, by Cyrus the Great. In 1260, Niccolò Polo and his brother Maffeo lived in Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey. After the Mongol conquest of Asia Minor, the Polo brothers liquidated their assets into tangible valuables such as gold and jewels and moved out of harm’s way. Having heard of advanced eastern civilizations the brothers traveled through much of Asia, and even met with the Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, who later became emperor of China and established the Yuan Dynasty. Not being the first to travel east of Iran, they had heard numerous stories regarding the riches to be discovered in the Far East. Twenty-four years later in 1295, after traveling almost 15,000 miles, they returned to Venice with many riches and treasures. The Polo brothers had experienced a quarter century of adventures on their way to Asia that were later transcribed into The Book of Marco Polo by a writer named Rustichello, who came from Pisa in Tuscany, Italy. This was the beginning of a quest that motivated explorers, including Christopher Columbus, from that time on.

the Public must not expect from me the elegance of a fine writer, or the plausibility of a professed book-maker; but will, I hope, consider me as a plain man,

Western attitudes toward Chinese and Japanese religions were formed largely from the descriptions given by Christian missionaries to those countries. Earlier accounts provided by travelers, such as Marco Polo, John of Montecorvino, Odoric of Pordenone, and others, were too vague and never mentioned the Buddhist sects as such (Demiéville 1964). So misleading, for instance, was Marco Polo's description of Cathay that it took some fifteen years for the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) to realize that this empire was none other than China.

By broadening your horizons,” he ventured, “what I meant is that education will give you a sense of the world’s scope, of its wonders, of its many and varied ways of life.” “Wouldn’t travel achieve that more effectively?” “Travel?” “We are talking about horizons, aren’t we? That horizontal line at the limit of sight? Rather than sitting in orderly rows in a schoolhouse, wouldn’t one be better served by working her way toward an actual horizon, so that she could see what lay beyond it? That’s what Marco Polo did when he traveled to China. And what Columbus did when he traveled to America. And what Peter the Great did when he traveled through Europe incognito!

One does not fulfill one’s potential by listening to Scheherazade in a gilded hall, or by reading the Odyssey in one’s den. One does so by setting forth into the vast unknown—just like Marco Polo when he traveled to China, or Columbus when he traveled to America.

The current Chinese regime’s proposed land-and-maritime Silk Road duplicates exactly the one Marco Polo traveled. This is no coincidence. The Mongols, whose Yuan Dynasty ruled China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, were, in fact, “early practitioners of globalization,” seeking to connect the whole of habitable Eurasia in a truly multicultural empire.

He studied copies or recountings of John Mandeville’s Travels (ca. 1360), Marco Polo’s Il Milione (Travels of Marco Polo, ca. 1298), and Ptolemy’s Guide to Drawing a Map of the World—the Geography—for the first time.

Gagarin, Buzz Aldrin and many others are the descendants of Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, pioneers who pushed the boundaries and who changed the world in ways they could not have imagined in their own lifetimes. Whether for better or worse is not the point; they discovered new opportunities and new spaces in which peoples would compete to make the most of what nature had put there. It will take generations, but in space, too, we will plant our flags, ‘conquer’ territory, claim ground and overcome the barriers the universe puts in our way. When we are reaching for the stars, the challenges ahead are such that we will perhaps have to come together to meet them: to travel the universe not as Russians, Americans or Chinese but as representatives of humanity. But so far, although we have broken free from the shackles of gravity, we are still imprisoned in our own minds, confined by our suspicion of the ‘other’, and thus our primal competition for resources. There is a long way to go.

Christianity for most of its history was equally spread across Europe, Asia, and Africa. It only became predominantly European in the fourteenth century, not because the continent had any special affinity for the religion, but by default: Europe was the only location in which the religion was not destroyed.

Even the tombs of Christian saints received visitors, due to the practice of posthumously declaring the saint to have actually been a Muslim in his earthly life.

All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

The last thing I want to give to the Great Master is a wooden plate inscribed with the word million . This word has been created all these years of my service with the Great Khan. Recounting to the Great Khan about his Great Empire I lacked a word which would at the same time represent a number, and yet so big to stand for the countless values of his Great Empire.

What makes The Travels such a powerful tale is not that it provides an absolute account of Marco’s travels, but, on the contrary how it creates the conditions for us to feel abandoned and lost.

What legendary travelers have taught us since Pausanius and Marco Polo is that the art of travel is the art of seeing what is sacred.

I guess whether we choose to travel as much as Marco Polo did or stay in the same spot from cradle to grave, life is a sequence of births and deaths. Moments are born and moments die. For new experiences to come to light, old ones need to wither away.

AROUND 1271 OR 1272, MARCO POLO, THE RENOWNED VENETIAN merchant adventurer, was on his way through Persia en route for Cathay when he came upon a story told by travellers in that region. Twenty-five years later he recounted it in his book II Milione, better known today as The Travels of Marco Polo. The story concerned a remote area ruled by one they called the Old Man of the Mountains, whose followers were notorious for their ruthlessness. According to Marco Polo, they had been in existence since the middle of the eleventh century and there was not an Arab leader who did not go in mortal dread of them. The disciples of this leader were kept loyal to their master by the promise that, were they to die whilst in his service, they would assuredly go to Paradise. To strengthen their resolve, the Old Man of the Mountains gave initiates to his following a preview of what it would be like in Paradise by maintaining a fabulous garden within his mountain stronghold. In this pleasure ground, exquisitely beautiful houris wandered ready to fulfil any desire, the fountains ran with milk and honey and the flowers were beyond compare. However, it was said, to enter this fabled place the would-be acolyte was first given a powerful drug and, only when unconscious, allowed in: before leaving, he was again drugged. After their induction, the initiates were given a solid Islamic education but were also taught the arts of murder, killing anyone whom their master commanded be put to death. Before going into battle, they apparently partook of the same drug to increase their courage. The drug was hashish. The veracity of Marco Polo’s writings has long been suspect, yet the story has stuck, enhanced and exaggerated as the centuries have passed. The legend of the Old Man of the Mountains has become nothing short of unassailable fact and his followers, notorious as much for their merciless cruelty as their gargantuan appetites for hashish, have become a byword for brutality. Even the name by which they came to be known derived from the drug it was alleged they took: they were called the Hashshashin. They are now known as the Assassins.