00:00The greatest travel story ever told began with a man locked in a Genoese prison.
00:04He was captured in a naval skirmish off the coast of Anatolia and thrown into a stone cell,
00:10where his cellmate was a bankrupt writer of romances.
00:13To pass the time, the traveler began talking about jade cities, sky-colored lakes,
00:19and emperors who commanded 10,000 elephants.
00:22He claimed he had spent 17 years in the court of Kublai Khan,
00:26not just as a guest, but as a messenger, tax inspector, and occasional envoy.
00:32Trusted so deeply, he once rode alone for three months across the Mongol Empire's grasslands,
00:38carrying the Khan's golden seals through bandit country without an escort.
00:43He said he once delivered a princess to Persia with a fleet of 14 ships,
00:47surviving pirates, shipwrecks, and mutiny,
00:51all to honor a promise made in the court of Kublai Khan.
00:55He claimed he hunted with hawks, studied salt maps with palace astrologers,
01:00and saw markets where merchants paid for silk and pearls
01:04using printed slips of mulberry bark, backed by the emperor's seal.
01:08His cellmate, awestruck, wrote it all down in French and called it
01:13Il Milione, the Million Lies.
01:16Scholars laughed.
01:18Popes requested copies.
01:19Sailors memorized his roots.
01:21He was dismissed and imitated in equal measure.
01:25Years later, on his deathbed, when asked if he had made it up,
01:29he answered,
01:30I didn't tell half of what I saw.
01:33His name was Marco Polo.
01:36He invented the East before Europe had ever seen it.
01:39This is just one story out of a thousand, waiting in the shadows of history.
01:43Follow Vault of Centuries for more untold mysteries, forgotten empires, and hidden truths.
