# Marco Polo **Marco Polo** (1254-1324) was a Venetian merchant whose twenty-four-year journey to the court of Kublai Khan, undertaken with his father and uncle from 1271, produced the account that became medieval Europe's principal source on Asia. Dictated to the romance writer Rustichello da Pisa while Polo was a prisoner in Genoa around 1298, *Il Milione* circulated in manuscript across Europe in dozens of versions. Its factual reliability has been contested since publication — the omissions are conspicuous and the numbers are frequently absurd — but its influence is not in dispute. It supplied the European image of a rich, orderly, enormous East that motivated the search for a direct route, and Columbus sailed with a heavily annotated copy. Polo is best read as evidence of what the [[Pax Mongolica]] made possible rather than as a documentary source on China. > [!note] Stub > Spine stub. Expand: the route and chronology, the Rustichello collaboration, the authenticity debate, and the text's reception and influence on the Age of Exploration.