The most noble and famous travels of Marco Polo [title page of the first edition].

At the age of seventeen, the Venetian Marco Polo (1254-1324) travelled with his merchant father, Nicolo, and his uncle, Maffeo, to the court of Kublai Khan. Polo was away from Venice for twenty-four years. His account of his travels and of the Peking (Beijing) court and its riches afforded the European world its first knowledge of the East. To some his stories were so fantastic that he was dubbed Marco Millioni, 'man of a million lies'