“Marco Polo’s Travels is a bad historical source that should not be relied upon for anything which cannot be independently verified.”

What other kind of source is there? For example, I’ve read the two earliest biographies of Charlemagne, one by a contemporary. Both have evident errors. People still use them, with care.

People who write about that era combine multiple sources in Persian, Chinese, Mongol, Latin, Greek, Italian, Arabic, Armenian, Syriac, and Tibetan in order to put the picture together. No source is completely reliable. People who have done that (e.g. Paul Pelliot and Igor de Rachewiltz, both of who read five or more of those languages) do not doubt Marco Polo the way you do. But I guess that they’re a special interest group or something.

And I don’t really see any particular motive for the skepticism. Polo wasn’t the only one to travel that route. He wasn’t even the only one to write a report. There’s really nothing unusual to set off the alarm bells. For the first time, and not for long, transcontinental travel had become possible. The distances were never the problem, it’s only 5000 miles from Paris to Beijing, and Polo started from much closer than that.

There was one single factual report in this mass, gathered from an ambassador from the Turkish Empire to the Byzantines ca. 600. It’s pretty sketchy, but can be shown to describe the foundation of the Sui dynasty.

During this same period Arab and Persian sailors brought back extensive information about China, but it was apparently not translated into Latin or Greek. After the rise of the Parthians and, even more so, the rise of Islam, travel to China became essentially impossible for Europeans.

The Mongols changed this, and after about 1250 a number of Westerners visitedsome part of China or neighboring areas in Mongolia and Central Asia. A number of awritten reports survive, almost all of them by priests except Polo’s. (There is also a report by a Turkish Christian who travelled from Mongol C. Asia near China to Europe, and a report in French by an Armenian prince).

Of the information brought by Polo, there’s an enormous amount that’s verifiable, and it fills a vacuum. There’s also a lot that isn’t, and if you cherry pick it it seems intimidating, but the skeptical arguments don’t add up.

The dating of Marco Polo is uncontroversial, and over a hundred manuscript copies circulated before it was first printed.

A case can be made that Polo made a lot of mistakes, but most historical sources do that. A case can be made that he lied some, but that only touches a few particular lies. By a very long stretch, a case can be made that everything he said was second hand, but I don’t see the point. His new information was voluminous and mostly mostly good , and if he had the information he got it from someone who did go to China, so the only thing that seems to be at doubt is whether he personally was the one who went to China, and that hardly seems worth bothering with. All you get is one or several John Does and Richard Roes not named Marco Polo who did go, plus Marco sitting in the Crimea writing everything down and pretending it was first hand knowledge. (Though he did not claim that everything was first hand knowledge).

I find the skepticism baffling. You’ve set up this story line of brave skeptics against stick in the mud scholars who have an axe to grind, but you argue from ethnocentric ignorance.

I find the belief that inaccuracies imply fraud particularly problematic. If someone found a supposed new manuscript that squared in every way with contemporary scholarly opinion, that would lead on to suspect a forgery based on contemporary secondary materials. What you want new materials for is to change the contemporary consensus, and most new sources are very obliging that way.

https://digitalcollections.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/41883/1/Marcopolo.html

http://www.amazon.com/Textes-dauteurs-latins-relatifs-lExtr%C3%AAme-Orient/dp/B003YOSPK6

Tempting to tell the students about the berets at the beginning, and see if they can make any more sense of it by the end.

(Actually, looking at the mob, it’s pretty multicultural, isn’t it?)