In this post I want to discuss how Marco Polo’s travel through India and China shows the evolving style of travel narratives/accounts. When we first started this class with Ibn Fadlan, his narrative of the “Land of Darkness” has a very personal feel to the story. While this has been the base line for our class, I want to put it into conversation with Benjamin of  Tudela. While Benjamin  still has his personal notes on his journey (specifically race, which I will discuss next blog post) it is not the same as Fadlan. We see that both the travel narrative and the travel account are blooming at very similar times alongside one another. How does this connect to Marco Polo? Polo is a culmination of the two ideas of what a travel text looks like. Polo (or Rustichello) blends the impersonal strictly “factual” (or as factual as one can get with personal bias obscuring the world) such as the four qualities that belongs to the people of the Khans while still talking about his own stories during his travels. We see that the idea of a travel text has evolved not only to show people back at home (who could afford to read the text)  serves to inform people of foreign areas (or also reinforce their ideas of what they want to believe) but also to fill their heads with mystical stories of wonder. The factual evidence begins with writers such as Benjamin of  Tudela who was very goal focused. Additionally, it is only natural to assume the human condition will add in it’s own perceptions of the world based on how the individual was raised. This can be seen with writers such as Ibn Fadlan.