Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, concerning the kingdoms and marvels of the East, volume 2

In 1298, two men shared a prison cell in Genoa. One was a Venetian merchant who had spent twenty-four years traversing the Mongol empire, from Persia to China, from the frozen steppes to the tropical islands of Indonesia. The other was Rustichello da Pisa, a writer of chivalric romances. Together, they forged one of the most influential books in Western literature. The resulting work, originally titled "Divisament dou monde" (Description of the World), introduced medieval Europe to wonders it had never imagined: paper money, coal as fuel, the postal system of Kublai Khan, the spice trade routes of the Indian Ocean. Polo's years at the Mongol court, where he served as envoy to the great Kublai Khan, furnished him with extraordinary tales of a civilization more sophisticated and wealthy than anything the West had known. Rustichello wrote it in Old French, and the result reads like a romance crossed with a merchant's ledger: precise in its facts, fiery in its imagination. The book sparked centuries of Western obsession with the East and helped seed the Age of Exploration. It remains essential for anyone curious about how the world first came to imagine itself as one vast web of kingdoms, customs, and marvels.