A number of Islamic writers and the 13th century Italian Marco Polo describe how this was obtained by sublimation from zinc ores and condensed onto clay or iron bars, archaeological examples of which have been identified at Kush in Iran.

Marco Polo brought some glazes back to Italy in the 13th century.

During the era after the war, later called the Pax Mongolica, adventurous Westerners such as Marco Polo travelled all the way to China and brought the first reports of its wonders to Europe.

Stories of kites were first brought to Europe by Marco Polo towards the end of the 13th century, and kites were brought back by sailors from Japan and Malaysia in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Marco Polo was not the first Westerner to travel to the Orient and return with amazing stories of this different culture, but his accounts published in the late 13th and early 14th centuries were the first to be widely read throughout Europe.

Over a period of thirty years, he visited most of the known Islamic world as well as many non-Muslim lands ; his journeys including trips to North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Africa, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe in the West, and to the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China in the East, a distance surpassing threefold his near-contemporary Marco Polo.

The most famous of these travelers was Marco Polo.

Illegal hunting of very rare species such as the snow leopard and the Marco Polo sheep.

Xanadu ( here called Ciandu, as Marco Polo spelled it ) on the French map of Asia made by Sanson d ' Abbeville, geographer of King Louis XIV, dated 1650.

This quotation was based upon the writings of the Venetian explorer Marco Polo who is widely believed to have visited Xanadu in about 1275.

Marco Polo also described a large portable palace made of gilded and lacquered cane or bamboo, and supported against the wind by two hundred silk cords, which could be taken apart quickly and moved from place to place.

One month after he came into office, Japanese troops clashed with Chinese troops near Peking in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident.

The name Madageiscar was first recorded in the memoirs of 13th-century Venetian explorer Marco Polo as a corrupted form of the name Mogadishu, the Somali port with which Polo had confused the island.

Marco Polo (; ; September 15, 1254 – January 9, 1324 ) was a Venetian merchant traveler whose travels are recorded in Il Milione, a book which did much to introduce Europeans to Central Asia and China.

Marco Polo's other legacies include Venice Marco Polo Airport, the Marco Polo sheep, and several books and films.

One possible place of birth is Venice's former contrada of San Giovanni Crisostomo, which is sometimes presented by historians as the birthplace, and it is generally accepted that Marco Polo was born in the Venetian Republic with most biographers pointing towards Venice itself as Marco Polo's home town.

According to The Travels of Marco Polo, they passed through much of Asia, and met with the Kublai Khan.

In 1271, during the dogado of Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo, Marco Polo ( at seventeen years of age ), his father, and his uncle set off for Asia on the series of adventures that were later documented in Marco's book.

* The Travels of Marco Polo, 13th century

In support of this claim, it has been noted that the 13th century traveller Marco Polo claimed to have seen a unicorn in Java, but his description makes it clear to the modern reader that he actually saw a Javan Rhinoceros.

Stories of kites were brought to Europe by Marco Polo towards the end of the 13th century, and kites were brought back by sailors from Japan and Malaysia in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Marco Polo recounted the Grand Canal's arched bridges as well as the warehouses and prosperous trade of its cities in the 13th century ( though doubts have been cast on Polo ’ s claims ).

Furthermore, although there have been claims that Marco Polo encountered eyeglasses during his travels in China in the 13th century, no such statement appears in his accounts.

In the 13th century, Marco Polo ( as quoted in Attenborough ( 1961: 32 ) stated " It was for all the world like an eagle, but one indeed of enormous size ; so big in fact that its quills were twelve paces long and thick in proportion.

These fields were described by Marco Polo in the 13th century, who described the output of those oil wells as hundreds of shiploads.

In Europe, the concept of banknotes was first introduced during the 13th century by travelers such as Marco Polo, with proper banknotes appearing in the 17th century.

Gilbert was one of the leading advocates for a north-west passage to the land of Cathay ( present-day China ), noted in great detail for its abundance of riches by Marco Polo in the 13th century.

Marco Polo wrote in the 13th century " The Chinese take some lime and chopped hemp, and these they knead together with a certain wood oil ; and when the three are thoroughly amalgamated they hold like any glue, and with this mixture they pay their ships ".

The famous explorer and traveler Marco Polo also mentions very large birds in his accounts of his journeys to the East during the 12th – 13th centuries.

In the West, some researchers would date the origins of sinology as far back as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta in the 13th and 14th century, but the systematic study of China began in the late 16th century, when Jesuit missionaries based at St. Paul's College, Macao, notably Matteo Ricci, introduced Christianity to China.

According to the writings of Marco Polo, in the 13th century the Tatars were able to condense milk.

The first western account of the breed comes from Marco Polo, who mentioned chickens with fur-like plumage in his Asian travelogues in the 13th century.

The earliest surviving written account of Silkies comes from Marco Polo, who wrote of a furry chicken in the 13th century, during his travels in Asia.

Famous Venetian traveler Marco Polo, who visited China, then under the Yuan Dynasty, in the late 13th century, described the prominence of Jewish traders in Beijing.

Marco II Sanudo lost many of the islands, except Naxos and Paros, to the forces of the renewed Byzantine Empire under the admiral Licario in the late 13th century.

* In 1997, Bernard and his brother David wrote an article ( available here ) questioning the authenticity of City of Light, a book that purported to be an account translated by David Selbourne of the voyage by Italian Jacob D ' Ancona to 13th Century China, years before Marco Polo.

During the 13th century AD, Marco Polo mentioned it as the richest empire in existence.

In the later part of the 13th century Venetian traveler Marco Polo visited the Pandyan kingdom and left a vivid description of the land and its people.

Marco Polo in his 13th-century travels, for example, describes the Persian race — the current concept of " race " dates back only to the 17th century.

So went the tale of the " Old Man in the Mountain ", assembled by Marco Polo and accepted by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, an 18th century Austrian orientalist writer responsible for much of the spread of this legend.

The Central Hall has a frescoed ceiling with the 17th century Incoronation of Bradamante by Marco Antonio Franceschini.

The West's exposure in Vietnam and Vietnam's exposure to Westerners dated back to 166 AD with the arrival of merchants from the Roman Empire, to 1292 with the visit of Marco Polo, and the early 16th century with the arrival of Portuguese in 1516 and other European traders and missionaries.

Large sailing junks of the Chinese Empire, described by various travellers to the East such as Marco Polo and Niccolò Da Conti, and used during the travels of Admiral Zheng He in the early 15th century, were contemporaries of such European vessels.

* San Marco in San Girolamo ( 18th century ), baroque church built by the Discalced Carmelites ;

The lexicon survives in one deeply corrupt 15th century manuscript, which is preserved in the library of San Marco at Venice, ( Marc.

These had originally four gates, Porta al Borgo, Porta San Marco, Porta Carratica and Porta Lucchese, all demolished at the beginning of the 20th century.

The 16th century historian Marco Antonio Guarini claimed that Hugues was buried in the Church of San Giacomo at Ferrara.

In 1562, Marco d ' Agrate's St. Bartholomew and the famous Trivulzio candelabrum ( 12th century ) were added.

* Venice's Biblioteca Marciana is completed by Vincenzo Scamozzi on the Piazza San Marco after more than a century of construction following a plan by the late Jacopo Sansovino.