On this day in 1324 Marco Polo died in Venice, at the age of seventy. The Travels of Marco Polo, dictated by Polo around 1300, several years after his return from decades in the land of Kublai Khan, became an influential book in Renaissance Europe. So dubious were some contemporaries of a vast and grandiose empire to the East that they published Polo's account as Il Milione, meaning "The Million Lies." Some modern scholars, suspicious of what isn't in the book -- any mention of tea, or foot-binding, or the Great Wall -- also wonder how reliable the Travels is, or if it is based on first-hand observation ... FULL STORY »
