The name of the city where they stayed is given as Kan-chau in some versions, Campichu in others. Precisely what city this name refers to and what the Polos did there for a year is a complete mystery.

Polo brothers in the court of Kublai Khan.
Khan gives them a tablet (paiza), ca. 1410-1412
FROM Historia, n° 764, août 2010,, p. 98
BY Maître de la mazarine et collab.
PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

As the story enters the Mongolian steppe, the writer promises: “I will now tell you all about the Tartars and how they acquired their empire and spread throughout the world.” In Marco’s version, the Mongols came from a region in the north to become subjects of Prester John. The source of the Prester John legend may have been a wish-fulfilling manuscript circulated during the Crusader invasions of Lebanon-Israel-Palestine, the area that is politically difficult to name in our own time. The Prester John legend described a powerful Christian king in the east who would join the Crusaders to defeat their enemies in the Islamic world. Marco equates this legendary figure with “a great lord who was called in their language Ung Khan, which simply means Great Lord.” He tells us that the Tartars chose as their leader “Chinghiz Khan, a man of great ability and wisdom, a gifted orator and a brilliant soldier.” Chinghiz unites the Tartars, then enters into a conflict with Prester John by requesting his daughter in marriage. A battle ensues, Prester John is defeated, and the expansion of the Tartars begins.

Marco presents a lineage of the rulers descended from Chinghiz leading to his patron Kublai, “greater and more powerful than any of the others.” Then he tells us about the culture of the horse nomads. They live in circular felt houses, moving with their herds and carrying their possessions on two-wheeled carts drawn by camels and oxen. He describes their family life, their religion, their food and drink, their manner of dress, their military tactics, and their property laws.

Perhaps Rustichello thought he was losing his audience with all these facts, so he inserts a digression to be more entertaining. “Here is another strange custom which I had forgotten to describe.” He adds a tale of posthumously marrying dead children to assure their happiness in the next life. Both his European audience and these foreigners hunted with falcons, so he describes a region to the far north where the best peregrine falcons are bred. At which point, he ends the background briefing, returns to Kan-chau, the city where the Polos spent their lost year, and starts out again on the journey to the court of Kublai Khan.

The Franciscans missionaries from this period provide much more details about Mongol culture. The Persian historians Juvaini and Rashid al-Din provide a more comprehensive description of the lineage of the Mongol rulers, princes and military commanders. They were both officials in the Mongol government with access to all the records of the Empire, including records available only to members of the ruling families. Marco Polo may have worked for Kublai Khan but, unlike the Persians, he was not commanded by his patron to write a history of the Mongol conquests. The history Marco gives us is a condensed version synthesized from stories that he heard.

While he gets some details wrong, what he tells us is essentially correct. The people he describes are recognizably medieval horse nomads. Written and oral traditions suggest that the Mongol tribes migrated from the Siberian taiga regions onto the steppe lands of present-day Mongolia, and this migration is supported by contemporary archeology. The battle between Chinghiz Khan and Prester John is a cliché of courtly romance, Rustichello’s way of making the story interesting. Prester John is understood today as a European fantasy, but the relationship and conflict between the man who initiated the Mongol expansion and the man Marco Polo identifies with the mythical king is confirmed by other sources. The Marco Polo-Rustichello version is a screenplay rewrite of events that actually took place.