with them, for they were jewel merchants by trade; they had had ample opportunities for business in China, and the Great Khan had loaded them with ’rubies and other handsome jewels of great value’ to boot.  Jewels were the most convenient form in which they could have brought home their wealth.  But the inquiring Marco brought other things also to tickle the curiosity of the Venetians, as he lets fall from time to time in his book.  He brought, for example, specimens of the silky hair of the Tangut yak, which his countrymen much admired, the dried head and feet of a musk deer, and the seeds of a dye plant (probably indigo) from Sumatra, which he sowed in Venice, but which never came up, because the climate was not sufficiently warm.[30] He brought presents also for the Doge; for an inventory made in 1351 of things found in the palace of Marino Faliero includes among others a ring given by Kublai Khan, a Tartar collar, a three-bladed sword, an Indian brocade, and a book ’written by the hand of the aforesaid Marco,’ called De locis mirabilibus Tartarorum.[31]

The rest of Marco Polo’s life is quickly told.  The legend goes that all the youth of Venice used to resort to the Ca’ Polo in order to hear his stories, for not even among the foreign sailors on the quays, where once the boy Marco had wandered and asked about the Tartars, were stories the like of his to be heard.  And because he was always talking of the greatness of Kublai Khan’s dominions, the millions of revenue, the millions of junks, the millions of riders, the millions of towns and cities, they gave him a nickname and jestingly called him Marco Milione, or Il Milione, which is, being interpreted, ’Million Marco’; and the name even crept into the public documents of the Republic, while the courtyard of his house became known as the Corte Milione.  To return from legend to history, the ancient rivalry between Venice and Genoa had been growing during Marco Polo’s absence, nor had Venice always prevailed.  Often as her galleys sailed,

dipping deep
For Famagusta and the hidden sun
That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire, ... 
Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges,
The pirate Genoese
Hell raked them till they rolled
Blood, water, fruit, and corpses up the hold.

At last in 1298, three years after Marco’s return, a Genoese fleet under Lamba Doria sailed for the Adriatic, to bate the pride of Venice in her own sea.  The Venetians fitted out a great fleet to meet it, and Marco Polo, the handy man who knew so much about navigation, albeit more skilled with Chinese junks than with western ships, went with it as gentleman commander of a galley.  The result of the encounter was a shattering victory for the Genoese off Curzola.  Sixty-eight Venetian galleys were burnt, and seven thousand prisoners were haled off to Genoa, among them Marco Polo, who had now a taste of the results of that enterprise, manliness, and warfare, whose absence he so deprecated in the men of Suchow.