Overview

Between 1419 and 1444, Niccolò de' Conti undertook an odyssey that has been compared with that of Marco Polo some 150 years before. Like Polo, Conti was a Venetian merchant who realized in his youth that international trade offered boundless opportunities for adventure, and like Polo he spent a quarter-century traveling in the East. Both men wrote of their journeys—in fact, their accounts have been published together—and though Polo and his writing are much better known, Conti's work also exerted considerable influence on Europeans' growing interest in exploration. As for the degree to which the two men became immersed in the life of the East, Conti exceeded Polo by a wide margin: Polo may have served in the court of an Eastern monarch, Kublai Khan, but Conti married an Indian...