Fall Asleep to the ENTIRE Story of Marco Polo — The Merchant Who Opened Europe's Eyes to Asia

You can now find me on Spotify 🎧 Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/0JZW8iO... This video tells the story of Marco Polo — the merchant’s son from Venice who left home at seventeen with his father and uncle, crossed the Pamir mountains and the Gobi Desert and three and a half years of the most difficult terrain on earth, arrived at the court of Kublai Khan, and spent seventeen years in the service of the most powerful ruler in the world before sailing home through the Indian Ocean with a hold full of gems sewn into his coat lining and a head full of things no European had ever seen. Venice in the thirteenth century was already extraordinary — a republic built entirely on commerce, its churches lined with plunder from Constantinople, its merchants at home in Alexandria and the Black Sea and every port between — and it was precisely that merchant’s education, that trained eye for how things worked and what they cost and how many, that made Marco the observer he was. He noticed the oil springs of Baku, the Zoroastrian fire temples of Yazd, the sewn ships of Hormuz that he didn’t trust to cross an ocean, and the high Pamirs where fires burned without heat because the air was too thin — the kind of detail only someone who had actually been there would know to record. What he found in China was a civilization so far beyond anything Europe could imagine that his readers, for two centuries, couldn’t decide whether to believe him. Cities of a million people. Paper that served as money, backed by the Khan’s own treasury. Black stones dug from mountains that burned as fuel — coal, used by ordinary households, powering blast furnaces and kilns at a scale Europe wouldn’t reach for five hundred years. A postal relay system that carried messages across the empire faster than a European king could send a letter to his own border. And Hangzhou — which he called the finest city in the world, and which probably was: a million people on canals, its markets open daily with silk and fish and every luxury, its wealthy residents drifting on West Lake in silk pavilion boats with musicians playing. He spent seventeen years in this world, governing provinces for Kublai Khan, sailing to Southeast Asia on diplomatic missions, accumulating a catalogue of marvels that his contemporaries at home would nickname him Millioni for — the exaggerator, the man of millions, the teller of tales too large to be believed. #HistoryForSleep #DriftThroughHistory #MarcoPolo #SilkRoad #AgeOfExploration