Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Three years after Venetian merchant and traveler Marco Polo (1254-1324) returned to Europe following his twenty-five-year journey through Asia, his war galley was captured by the Genoese, and he was thrown into prison. . . . For centuries--until European travelers began to venture into Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--his account remained the most important source of knowledge in the West about the Far East." [Furtado: 1001 Days] "A key step to the bridging of Asia and Europe in trade." [Wikipedia: Timeline of Middle Ages]