Marco Polo was a merchant and traveler in Europe. His main achievement is writing the book about his adventures and also traveling to China and Exploring what China was like back then.
Marco Polo was from the family of merchants and travelers so they usually traveled around. One time Marco Polo’s father traveled to China and told Marco about all the wonderful things in China. Marco Polo was really awed and wanted to go see for himself how wonderful China was. He decided when he grew up he would go and visit China.
When he first went to china, the the king/emperor welcomed him and was really fascinated by him since he knew how to speak 4 languages and also because his culture: Christianity. After a bunch of time spent there, he was sent to Europe back again, but the next time he comes back he brings 10 priests, so the Emperor could study Christianity and increase the knowledge of his people.
So now, Marco Polo came back to Europe and he’s ready to travel back to China WITH only two priests he managed to convince. He met a lot of hardships when crossing the deserts to go to China. There were sand dunes that “lured” people in, but Marco Polo evaded that. There were bandits to rob you, but Marco evaded that using the “golden passport”. If somebody were to rob somebody with a golden passport, they would be against the WHOLE army of China. However even though Marco evaded them successfully, the priests hated traveling like this and they had to drop the priests off back at Europe.
When Marco Polo returned to China, he was greeted as a royal guest and was really popular. Many people wanted to have a good relationship with him and he was treated to the best food, the best wealth and the best things in China. After a couple years in China, he decided he wanted to go back to tell his people of the amazing wealth and power of China, also because the recent Emperor is close to dying and who knows how well the next Emperor will treat him. Even though the Emperor was reluctant, he agreed but he wanted Marco to accompany the princess to another place for a arrangement/peace treaty. The trip was really dangerous and in the end, only Marco’s family survived and the princess.
So now that Marco is returning home, what will happen when he gets to Europe? Well things did not look good for him since he was going to be sent to jail. At jail, he and his “roommate” shared stories, but Marco’s story about China intrigued him. Together they made a book about Marco’s adventure to China and once they were out of jail, they sold the book and the it turned out to be a over-night bestseller.
Marco influenced many people and also made plenty of enemies. Lots of people thought he was not saying the truth because one, they simply didn’t believe it, or two, they didn’t like the idea of another empire being significantly greater than them.
Overall Marco’s adventure told us lots of information about history, especially China, and even though we don’t know too much about Marco himself, we will always remember the adventures the he went through and the great feats that he did. His last words were “I have not told half of what I saw”.