The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 by Marco Polo and da Pisa Rusticiano

MARCO, the Author of our Book, born in 1254,[9] and MAFFEO, of whose place in the family we shall have a few words to say presently. The story opens, as we have said, in 1260, when we find the two brothers, Nicolo and Maffeo the Elder, at Constantinople. How long they had been absent from Venice we are not distinctly told. Nicolo had left his wife there behind him; Maffeo apparently was a bachelor. In the year named they started on a trading venture to the Crimea, whence a succession of openings and chances, recounted in the Introductory chapters of Marco’s work, carried them far north along the Volga, and thence first to Bokhara, and then to the Court of the Great Kaan Kúblái in the Far East, on or within the borders of CATHAY. That a great and civilized country so called existed in the extremity of Asia had already been reported in Europe by the Friars Plano Carpini (1246) and William Rubruquis (1253), who had not indeed reached its frontiers, but had met with its people at the Court of the Great Kaan in Mongolia; whilst the latter of the two with characteristic acumen had seen that they were identical with the Seres of classic fame. [Sidenote: Their intercourse with Kúblái Kaan.]