On the trail of Marco Polo the second trip · The second trip in On the trail of Marco Polo
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The second trip in On the trail of Marco Polo
The second trip in On the trail of Marco Polo
The brothers went back to Acre, this time with young Marco, and then up to Jerusalem to get some oil from the holy sepulchre which the Khan had requested. They then set off East again without a papal reply to the Khan's letters.
Word reached them that a Pope had finally been elected, and that it was their friend Theobald, papal legate in Acre. They returned to Acre, got replies to the letters, and headed off for Kublai's court again in late 1271. They had letters from the Pope and two friars instead of the 100 scholars the Khan had requested. But the friars soon turned back. It is interesting to speculate on how history might have been different if the Pope had sent the requested 100 scholars. The Khan also invited scholars and missionaries from other places ? Tibetan Buddhists and Persian Muslims ? and those had a great effect on China.
They went East overland, traveling by caravan and heading for Hormuz on the Persian Gulf. Today the city is gone but the phrase "the straits of Hormuz" still turns up in newscasts. It is the narrows at the outlet of the Gulf. The nearest modern city is Bandar Abbas, capital of Iran's Hormuzgan province.
Their route was indirect, setting out from the Mediterranean port of Laias, North to Armenia and Georgia, then to Mosul in what is now Iraq, then into Persia (now known as Iran) via Tabriz, Yazd and Kerman to Hormuz. The book talks of Damascus and Baghdad, but it is doubtful they actually visited those cities.
The original plan was to take a ship East from Hormuz, but after reaching Hormuz they decided to swing North instead. Marco would later come to Hormuz by sea, taking the Maritime Silk Road on his return journey.
The three men went back to Kerman and on to Persia's Eastern province of Khorasan. This put them on the main Silk Road route. The branch they took involved going Northeast to Balkh, then Southeast toward Kashmir and finally North to reach Khotan in what is now Xinjiang. The major routes today are the Khyber Pass from Afghanistan into Pakistan and the Karakoram Highway North to China, but the Polos' exact route is unclear. They may have taken lesser-known passes such as the route through Ladakh.
The brothers had taken the Northern branch of the Silk Road around the Kalimakan Desert on the previous trip. This time, the first city they reached in what is now China was Khotan, in the middle of the Southern branch, so naturally they continued East on that branch.
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On the trail of Marco Polo Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.