Marco Polo: His Travels and Adventures

In 1271, at the age of seventeen, Marco Polo, his father, and his uncle, set off from Venice for Asia.

After twenty-four years, travelling over fifteen thousand miles in far and distant lands, they returned home.

Marco Polo was certainly not the first European to make the journey to the Far East, indeed his father and uncle had already made the journey when he was just a young boy, and they would certainly not be the last, yet what made Marco Polo’s journey so remarkable was the fact that it was written down.

Through a cruel twist of fate Polo was imprisoned by the Genoese after he had returned to Italy, but during this incarceration he retold his life of adventure to fellow inmate, Rustichello da Pisa, who recorded the story which became known across Europe as The Travels of Marco Polo.

This work, which brought the enthralling world of the East to life, has fascinated readers for centuries.

George Makepeace Towle’s biography of Marco Polo brings this story to readers of the twenty-first century. It is a brilliant work that uncovers what life was like for this young Italian trader as he explored the Middle East and China during a period when much of this world was under control of the Mongols.

George Makepeace Towle was an American author who also worked as a lawyer and politician. He wrote a number of historical works, including a biography of Henry V and a history of France, but he was most famous for translating Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne into English. His book Marco Polo: His Travels and Adventures was first published in 1880 and Towle passed away in 1893.