Marco Polo's Lies

"Marco Polo often reported hearsay and had a tendency to stretch the truth. He wrote of enormous p'eng birds, or gryphons, from Madagascar, for example, that were large enough to consume elephants as well as men with dog features. Some of his accounts were outright lies. In one section, he relates how the Polos helped the Mongols capture the southern city of Xiangyang from the Southern Song dynasty by introducing the Mongols to catapults. It turns out the Mongols already had catapults and the city fell two years before the Polos arrived in China.

Some historians have suggested that Marco Polo never went to China and that his adventures were based on accounts that he heard while working at his family's trading outposts on the Black Sea and in Constantinople. These historians base their argument on: 1) the fact that Rustichello was a fiction writer who probably embellished the account; 2) that Marco Polo failed to describe the Great Wall of China, chopsticks, tea, calligraphy or the binding of women’s feet; 3) that the things he described—paper money, porcelain—were well known to travelers who came to Constantinople and other trading areas; and 4) that Marco Polo wasn't mentioned at all in the extensive Chinese archives between 1271 and 1295 even though he described himself as a personal emissary of Kublai Khan.

Historians that contend that Marco Polo’s journey probably did take place argue: 1) that tea and chopsticks were so commonplace perhaps Marco Polo failed to mention them because he was so used to them; 2) that foot binding was something practiced mainly by upper class women who rarely left their homes so Marco Polo didn't see them; 3) that the Great Wall as we know it today for the most part was built after Marco Polo's death (in his time it was decaying mud bricks) and walls around towns and cities were as common in Europe as they were in China; and 4) that documents that may have mentioned Marco Polo probably were destroyed (many Mongol documents after the Mongols were ousted from China)."

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