For example, some of the more famous and disputed elements of the Travels include Polo’s accounts of fantastical creatures, such as the unicorns he describes in his travels through China. He also mentions a giant bird in the desert and demonic creatures in remote parts of Asia. These fantastical descriptions have raised the question of whether Polo was simply misinformed, exaggerating, or incorporating elements of local folklore that may have been difficult for a European to distinguish from reality.
Another widely debated claim is that Marco Polo never actually visited China at all. Some historians suggest that his experiences may have been secondhand, gleaned from others who had traveled to the region or even invented for the sake of entertaining the audience back home. The possibility that Polo embellished his journey for dramatic effect has led some to argue that the Travels can be classified as a work of semi-fiction, in which the line between documentary and fantasy becomes blurred.
The Influence of Storytelling Tradition
One must also consider the storytelling conventions of the time in which Marco Polo lived. Polo was not a professional historian or journalist; he was a Venetian merchant and adventurer, and his narrative was influenced by the literary tradition of his time. Travel narratives in the Middle Ages were often infused with romanticized depictions of foreign lands, often combining fact with myth. This blend of the real and the imagined was not necessarily viewed as contradictory during Polo’s time. It was common for travelers to embellish their stories to captivate their audiences and present an idealized vision of the exotic East.
The Travels were written by Rustichello de Pisa, a fellow prisoner of Polo, who was tasked with transcribing Polo’s accounts. Given that Rustichello was a writer of romance novels, it is possible that he infused Polo’s tale with some of the literary tropes common to medieval chivalric literature. The result is a travelogue that reads like a mixture of history, adventure, and legend—a work that walks a fine line between the documentary and the fantastical. shutdown123