Italian · 1254–1324
A Venetian merchant's son who left home at seventeen and came back at forty-one, having spent seventeen years in the service of Kublai Khan. He crossed the Pamirs and the Gobi, saw Hangzhou when it was the largest city on earth, and described paper money, coal, asbestos and the Mongol postal relay to Europeans who had no words for any of them. In 1298 he was captured in a sea battle against Genoa and shared a cell with Rustichello da Pisa, a writer of Arthurian romances, who took down his stories in Franco-Italian. The book spread across Europe in manuscript under a dozen titles. Contemporaries nicknamed it Il Milione, the million lies. Two centuries later Columbus carried a copy annotated in his own hand. On his deathbed Polo is supposed to have said he had not told half of what he saw.