But, owing to a fortunate chance, they were at last enabled to get back to Europe.  The Khan of Persia desired to marry a princess of the Great Khan’s family, to whom he was related, and as the young lady upon whom the choice fell could not be expected to undergo the hardships of the overland journey from China to Persia, it was decided to send her by sea round the coast of Asia.  The Tatars were riot good navigators, and the Polos at last obtained permission to escort the young princess on the rather perilous voyage.  They started in 1292, from Zayton, a port in Fokien, and after a voyage of over two years round the South coast of Asia, successfully carried the lady to her destined home, though she ultimately had to marry the son instead of the father, who had died in the interim.  They took leave of her, and travelled through Persia to their own place, which they reached in 1295.  When they arrived at the ancestral mansion of the Polos, in their coarse dress of Tatar cut, their relatives for some time refused to believe that they were really the long-lost merchants.  But the Polos invited them to a banquet, in which they dressed themselves all in their best, and put on new suits for every course, giving the clothes they had taken off to the servants.  At the conclusion of the banquet they brought forth the shabby dresses in which they had first arrived, and taking sharp knives, began to rip up the seams, from which they took vast quantities of rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, diamonds, and emeralds, into which form they had converted most of their property.  This exhibition naturally changed the character of the welcome they received from their relatives, who were then eager to learn how they had come by such riches.

In describing the wealth of the Great Khan, Marco Polo, who was the chief spokesman of the party, was obliged to use the numeral “million” to express the amount of his wealth and the number of the population over whom he ruled.  This was regarded as part of the usual travellers’ tales, and Marco Polo was generally known by his friends as “Messer Marco Millione.”

Such a reception of his stories was no great encouragement to Marco to tell the tale of his remarkable travels, but in the year of his arrival at Venice a war broke out between Genoa and the Queen of the Adriatic, in which Marco Polo was captured and cast into prison at Genoa.  There he found as a fellow-prisoner one Rusticano of Pisa, a man of some learning and a sort of predecessor of Sir Thomas Malory, since he had devoted much time to re-writing, in prose, abstracts of the many romances relating to the Round Table.  These he wrote, not in Italian (which can scarcely be said to have existed for literary purposes in those days), but in French, the common language of chivalry throughout Western Europe.  While in prison with Marco Polo, he took down in French the narrative of the great traveller, and thus preserved it for all time.  Marco Polo was released in 1299, and returned to Venice, where he died some time after 9th January 1334, the date of his will.