Comments by "" (@neutronalchemist3241) on "History-Makers: Marco Polo" video.

  1. Actually the depiction he gives of the rhino is very accurate, and it's easy to recognise a Sumatran Rhinoceros in it. (hairs like a buffalo, feet like an elephant, a big and black horn, the head of a boar that it keeps pointed to the ground, he loves to stay in the mud)
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  2. Many other travelers of that era didn't mention tea, the great wall, or chopsticks. Marco was a traveler, not a westerner that enters in a Chinese restaurant and discover he can't have a fork for the first time in his life. He saw and practiced dozens of way of eating and tasted hundreds of beverages. Tea and chopsticks were not particularly weird.
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  3. The Romans in constantinoples deserved it for the massacre of Latins (and for not paying their mercenaries, that's always a bad move).
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  4.  @justinpachi3707  They asked for some of his predecessors? The empire was not exactly a democracy, was it? Their emperor didn't pay for his mercenaries, and that tend to be a bad idea.
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  5. Battuta was a great traveler, but he mostly traveled into the Islamic world, so in an already known settings. Like a Christian traveling western and eastern Europe.
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  6. From the depiction he gives, that's very accurate not coming from a naturalist, it's easy to guess that he saw a Sumatran rhino.
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  7. One has to understand that Marco Polo was not a westerner that entred into a chinese restaurant for the first time, discovered there weren't forks and "how strange!". At that point he had visited many different people that eat in many different ways (mostly with bare hands). Chopsticks were a petty thing to him.
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  8. Always pay your mercenaries. The "selling out it's neighbours to the Mongols" is utter bullshit.
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  9. Feet, not meters. Many travelers that went in China in that era didn't mention it. Ibn Battuta heard of it, but wrote that he didn't see it, and had not been able to find someone that saw it.
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  10. So credible that he copied entire passages, as old as 150 years, from previous travelers.
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  11. Weird school. Marco Polo was for sure a real person (there are tons of documents about him and his family) and the number of scholars that doubted about his travels dwindled as long as more Chinese, European and Persian reports about the early Yuan dinasty are found.
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  12. No. Marco's accounts are the most complete of any traveler we know. He gives more verified details than any other, and they are the more verified the more we discover Chinese and Persian accounts. Fact is that Chinese reports of the early Yuan dinasty are pretty scarce. Marco is often the source closest to the facts.
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