I like Marco Polo. (Lex laughing) I use his work a lot. I find him very reliable, and the areas where he is not reliable, you can kind of tell, because he didn't, he wasn't there, but the places he was, he reported a lot of stuff, and so I'm very much indebted to him for a lot of things, because with something like the Princess Kokochin, and also another fighting princess from Central Asia named Khutulun, he wrote about that, but I also needed other sources, so I found if I could find Chinese sources, or Arab sources, or something else, or Persian to support it, then I really felt a lot of confidence with him, over time. But pieces were romanticized, and you have to always discount it, but he's very good.
However, I believe the best work written about Marco Polo, aside from his own book, which was actually written by Rustichello, dictated in prison, in general, you know, in the 20th century, Eugene O'Neill wrote a play that became a comedy on Broadway called "Marco Millions", that was both a play on what he was called "El Millioni", "The Million One", 'cause he had talked about cities of millions of people, and about money in the millions, and things that people in Europe just couldn't believe could happen. He then published his whole play as a book to show people what he really meant. And it was an ironic look at capitalism, 'cause this is 20th century already, versus the idea of like a philosopher king, which he saw in Kublai Khan. And so Marco Polo becomes a symbol of capitalism, not at its worst, but at its most basic.
And that is, like the princess in this story. This is not in real life, but this is in the play written by Eugene O'Neill, but I think it captures a lot. The Princess Kokochin says, "Marco is an excellent judge of quantity." And there were things like that, and then in the play, Bayan, the great general, he talks with Kublai Khan, and he said, "Look, these people are dangerous from the West, we should go conquer them now while we can." Kublai Khan tells Bayan again in the play, this is fiction, but he tells Bayan, "They are not worth conquering, and if we conquer them, we will become like them." And he said, "Marco Polo has been in our land, he has seen everything, he has learned nothing, he has seen everything, he understands nothing."
For me, this was such an important moment in the history of the world symbolically, with Marco Polo, and Kublai Khan, the coming together of two worlds. It could have gone a different way, it could have gone a different way. And I am, it's not that I'm anti-capitalist, I'm pro-capitalist, but the way so many things worked out, it was a misstep in history. Maybe we took the wrong step at that moment, and we could have learned more from cooperation.
