Comments by "" (@neutronalchemist3241) on "Marco Polo: The World's Greatest Explorer" video.

No document states him being born in Croatia. One commentator, about a century after his death, wrote that his family was originary of Dalmatia, but the documents certify that already his grandfather did born in Venice.
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Battuta is probably the greatest known traveler, but he mostly traveled into islamic world, with very few and limited journeys out of it. So most of his voyages were not really "explorations", because he moved into a generally well known setting. Like a Christian traveling western and eastern Europe.
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Not really that tragic. He died as a wealty man, surrounded by his family. Yeah, many didn't believe him, but many others did.
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Battuta is probably the greatest known traveler, but he mostly traveled into islamic world, with very few and limited journeys out of it. So most of his voyages were not really "explorations", because he moved into a generally well known setting. Like a Christian traveling western and eastern Europe.
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He was born in Venice. MAYBE (there is actually no evidence on this claim) his family was of dalmatian origin, but they lived in Venice at least since Marco's grandfather.
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Marco Polo described chinese banknotes. However European merchants of the time used promissory notes and letters of credit, that were paper money. (very little exchange of acutal metal was involved in long distance commerce in those days). Even pilgrims often traveled carrying only paper with them.
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He never said to have seen dragons, but described an animal that could be seen in the province of Carajan, like someone could describe a bigfoot from the accounts he heard in Oregon. His description of the animal is very similar to that of a giant salamander. According to Polo, the biggest samples could reach 10m lenght. The biggest giant salamanders are 2m lenght (and is not impossible that Polo described a now extinct bigger subspecies, since the same Polo said those animals were relentlessly hunted). We have seen far greater exagerations in other explorers' accounts.
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He believed he was in islands east of Japan because that's exactly where the islands he find would have been in Toscanelli's map. The irony is that, the same moment he put his foot in the South American continent, he wrote that was a new unexplored continent.
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He never said to have seen dragons, but described an animal that could be seen in the province of Carajan, like someone could describe a bigfoot from the accounts he heard in Oregon. His description of the animal is very similar to that of a giant salamander. According to Polo, the biggest samples could reach 10m lenght. The biggest giant salamanders are 2m lenght (and is not impossible that Polo described a now extinct bigger subspecies, since the same Polo said those animals were relentlessly hunted). We have seen far greater exagerations in other explorers' accounts.
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He was born in Venice. MAYBE his family was of dalmatian origin, but they lived in Venice at least since Marco's grandfather.
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There are a lot of historical characters that have no Chinese records. Chinese records are far from complete, ESPECIALLY during the early Yuan dinasty. Much of the Chinese documents with wich we compare "the travels of Marco Polo" to see wether Marco was right or not, are actually been written AFTER Marco's book. Sometimes MUCH later. Because the original records had been lost. For many events, "Il Milione" is actually the closest source. IE the only Chinese account we have of the diplomatic mission in Persia, that was Marco's journey back home, had been written more than a century after "Il Milione", and is far less complete than Marco's account.
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His stories were published when he was alive, and not even that old. He became quite famous. There is not however an "original" text. As usual then, since the books were handwritten, the same Rustichello wrote several slightly different versions of the book, and in every version there are episodes that are absent from the others.
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By venetians account, he was born in Venice, like his father and his grandfahter at least, and presented himself as a "citizen of Venice" not of some Croatian island.
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Why should him? Marco Polo was not a tourist, but a merchant and a traveler. Chopsticks were one of the many ways to eat he did see in his travels, why should he have given it any importance? Reconstructing the itinerary of marco Polo to and in China is easy to see that he never came close to the great wall. Not to say that the wall was built to keep the Mongols out of China, so the Mongols were not eager to show it as a tourist attraction, and was largely in ruin at that time. And, above all. We have to remember that the book was not written by Marco polo, but by Rustichello. He selected what stories had to be written and what not, based on their awesomeness. Sticks and walls were not so interesting in respect to the other things.
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@k.kdowning3284 I repeat. He was not a tourist that enters into a Chinese restaurant and "Oh! I can't have a fork!". For a traveler that mostly eated with his fingers, those were pettyness. The way the commerce of spices in the port of Zayton worked was the relevant thing.
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Slavery had not been invented by Europeans, nor they were te only ones practicing it. All the people the Europeans enslaved, practiced slavery themself. Europeans are actually the ones that came to the conclusion that slavery was a bad thing. Marco Polo didn't enslaved anyone. The great Arab traveler Ibn Battuta instead had many slaves, even several sex slaves with which he made children.
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The Great Wall familiar to us had been built two centuries after Marco Polo's travels. In his time the wall was a much smaller structure, largely in ruin. Other Europeans who travelled to Khanbaliq during the Yuan dynasty, such as Giovanni de' Marignolli and Odoric of Pordenone, said nothing about the wall either. Ibn Battuta, who asked about the wall when he visited China during the Yuan dynasty, could find no one who had either seen it, or knew of anyone who had seen it. Marco Polo was a traveler and a merchant, not a tourist that enters in a chinese restaurant and discovers he can't have a fork. Chopsticks were one of the many ways of eating he had seen during his voyage. Tea one of the innumerable kind of beverages. What there were interesting in them? The way the commerce of spices in the port of Zayton worked, or the way Chinese ships were designed and built were the relevant things, not sticks. Reality is that those "important" things had ben omitted by later travelers as well, because they were of no interest to them, and Marco Polo's accounts are by far the most complete written by an European traveler in the Yuan dinasty. Chinese reports dates back to very ancient times, but are far from complete, especially during the early Yuan dinasty (even the Princess Kököchin is not mentioned in Chinese sources, while is present in Persian ones). Much Chines sources about the early Yuan dinasty had actually been written later than Marco Polo's book. More, there is no point in searching European names in them, and Marco Polo being a governor is a later embellishment. Earlier versions of his book only states him to be an emissary of the Emperor, like there were tens of thousands. Actually Chinese had not really a "tradition or folklore of exploring". BTW Europeans first reached America about three centuries before Marco Polo reached China.
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