The Mysteries of the Marco Polo Maps

Within the thirteenth century, Italian service provider and explorer Marco Polo traveled from Venice to the far reaches of Asia, a journey he chronicled in a story titled
Il Milione, later often called
The Travels of Marco Polo. Whereas Polo’s writings would go on to encourage the likes of Christopher Columbus, students have lengthy debated their veracity. Some have argued that Polo by no means even reached China, whereas others imagine that he got here so far as the Americas. Now, there’s new proof for this historic puzzle: a really curious assortment of fourteen little-known maps and associated paperwork stated to have belonged to the household of Marco Polo himself.

In
The Mysteries of the Marco Polo Maps, historian of cartography Benjamin B. Olshin affords the primary credible book-length evaluation of those artifacts, charting their course from obscure origins within the non-public assortment of Italian-American immigrant Marcian Rossi within the Thirties; to investigations of their authenticity by the Library of Congress, J. Edgar Hoover, and the FBI; to the work of the late cartographic scholar Leo Bagrow; to Olshin’s personal efforts to trace down and research the Rossi maps, all however one among that are within the possession of Rossi’s great-grandson Jeffrey Pendergraft. Are the maps forgeries, facsimiles, or modernized copies? Did Marco Polo’s daughters―whose names seem on a number of of the artifacts―protect in them geographic details about Asia first recorded by their father? Or did they inherit maps created by him? Did Marco Polo entrust the maps to Admiral Ruggero Sanseverino, who has hyperlinks to Rossi’s household line? Or, if the maps don’t have any connection to Marco Polo, who made them, when, and why?

Whatever the maps’ provenance, Olshin’s story―stretching from the distant reaches of the northern Pacific to early Chinese language legends―takes readers on a journey confounding but fascinating, providing insights into Italian historical past, the age of exploration, and the wonders of cartography.