Marco Polo

person

Venetian merchant, born around 1254 and died in 1324, who left for Asia in 1271 with his father and uncle, spent years in the service or at least the orbit of Kublai Khan, and returned by sea in 1295. The account dictated to the romance writer Rustichello da Pisa while in Genoese custody around 1298 became the most widely read European description of Asia before the age of exploration and shaped what Europe expected to find there. He is unusual precisely because he claimed the whole length of a route that almost everyone else worked in segments. A minority of historians, notably Frances Wood in 1995, have questioned whether he reached China at all; the mainstream view accepts the journey while treating the text as a collaborative and embellished work. A person, not a place.

A person is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.