Person · Venetian traveller & merchant · Italy

Marco Polo

Date

1254–1324

Function

Trade & production

Confidence

Established / referenced — established; the text survives in many divergent versions

Connections (4)

• Traveller routeMotupalli

  Polo's book describes a kingdom he calls Mutfili, reached on the homeward coasting of 1292–93, which is the Kakatiya port of Motupalli on the Andhra coast. He reports it as ruled by a widowed queen of some thirty or forty years' standing, greatly loved by her people, and he devotes an unusual amount of space to the diamond workings of the interior — the first European notice of the fields that later produced the Koh-i-Noor. The port's own Sanskrit and Telugu charter confirms the merchant traffic he saw.

• Traveller routeRudrama Devī

  The queen Polo describes in Mutfili is Rudrama Devī, or more probably her memory a few years after her death, since he reports the reign as having lasted forty years and the widow as still ruling. What matters is that a Venetian merchant, with no interest in Indian dynastic arrangements, thought it remarkable enough to record that a woman held the state alone and was well regarded for it — outside confirmation of what the Kakatiya inscriptions claim.

• Traveller routeNakkavaram / Nicobar Islands

  Marco Polo coasted the Nicobars in 1292 on his way home and describes them under a name close to the Nakkavaram of the Tanjore inscription — two and a half centuries apart, an Indian imperial record and a Venetian merchant's account naming the same islands on the same sailing route. It is the clearest external corroboration any name in the Chola list has, and it is why this one is generally accepted.

• Traveller routeMantai

  Polo coasted Ceylon on the way home in the 1290s, described the pearl fishery in the Palk Strait in detail, including the divers, the shark-charmers and the ruler's tenth, and then worked up both Indian coasts. His account of the fishery matches the Periplus twelve centuries earlier and the Dutch reports four centuries later, because the banks and the method had not changed.

On these journeys

• The Indian Ocean World — the whole rim

Sources

Wikipedia, “Marco Polo”. Marco Polo, The Description of the World, ed. A.C. Moule and Paul Pelliot (1938).

• Wikipedia — Marco Polo