Marco Polo Trivia
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46 free Marco Polo trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Marco Polo trivia quiz follows the Venetian merchant's son from the lagoon to the court of the Great Khan and back. The easy questions cover the basics: the city he came from, the ruler he served, the road he travelled, the book he dictated in prison, the swimming-pool game and the pasta story that is not true. From there it moves through his father and uncle's first journey, the 15-year-old who met his father for the first time, the pope-shaped delay, the sacred oil from Jerusalem, the 17 years in China and the princess he escorted to Persia. The harder end covers the nickname Milione, the trebuchet-armed galley, the cellmate who wrote Arthurian romances, the 150 surviving manuscripts, the Dominican Latin translation, the comet he described to Pietro d'Abano, the daughters and the Tartar servant in his will, the things he never mentioned (tea, chopsticks, the Great Wall) and why modern scholars think he went to China after all, from paper money to salt revenues to a Chinese courtier called Boluo. Every answer was checked against Marco Polo's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Silk Road and Genghis Khan quizzes are natural companions.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which real animal did Marco Polo describe in his book as a unicorn?
A rhinoceros
A rhinoceros. Polo grumbled that the mud-loving beast was ugly and nothing like the unicorn of the old stories, which a maiden was supposed to be able to tame.
Q 02Which Mongol ruler's court received the Polos in China?
Kublai Khan
Kublai Khan. Genghis Khan's grandson found the Polos so useful that he refused several times to let them go home.
Q 03According to legend, what spilled out when the returning Polos ripped open the shabby clothes they had travelled in?
Jewels
Jewels. In the tale the Polos had turned their fortune into rubies, sapphires and emeralds and sewn them into the seams, because gold was too heavy to carry home across Asia.
Q 04Marco Polo first met his father at about 15, after Niccolò spent years doing what?
Trading in Asia
Trading in Asia. Niccolò left before Marco was born and came home to learn that his wife had died and that he had a teenage son.
Q 05In the Persian city of Saveh, Marco Polo said he was shown the tombs of which biblical figures?
The Three Wise Men
The Three Wise Men. Polo wrote that their bodies lay in three fine tombs with hair and beards intact, yet the townspeople knew only that three kings were buried there.
Q 06Which nickname, now his book's Italian title, is Marco Polo said to have earned by forever talking of the Khan's riches?
Il Milione
Il Milione, 'the Million'. A 16th-century editor wrote that his fellow citizens named him for reckoning the Khan's wealth in millions, though it may be an older family nickname.
Q 07Marco Polo's 'Old Man of the Mountain', said to drug recruits and wake them in a garden paradise, led which feared sect?
The Assassins
The Assassins. In Polo's telling the youths believed they had tasted heaven, and would kill or die on command for the chance to get back in.
Q 08A churchman the Polos befriended at Acre, Tedaldo Visconti, was elected to which office soon after they set out?
Pope
Pope. He became Gregory X at the end of a papal election that had dragged on for nearly three years, and called the Polos back to Acre to give them letters for the Khan.
Q 09The Great Khan asked the elder Polos to bring him holy oil from a lamp burning in which city?
Jerusalem
Jerusalem. The lamp burned at the Holy Sepulchre, the traditional tomb of Christ; the Polos collected the oil on their way back east and handed it to the Khan years later.
Q 10Why did the Polos travel overland rather than sail from Hormuz to China?
The ships there were not seaworthy
The ships there were not seaworthy. Polo wrote that Hormuz vessels had no iron nails and were stitched together with coconut-husk twine, and that many of them were lost.
Q 11What job did Marco Polo say he did for the Great Khan?
Roving envoy
Roving envoy. The Khan is said to have enjoyed the lively reports Marco brought back from each mission, and kept sending him to the far corners of the empire.
Q 12Marco Polo reported that cloth woven from asbestos was the supposed fur of which legendary fire-dwelling creature?
The salamander
The salamander. Polo insisted that no animal can live in fire: the cloth was spun from a fibre dug out of a mountain, and was cleaned by throwing it into the flames.
Q 13Whom did the Mongol princess the Polos escorted marry on finding her betrothed dead?
His son
Q 21Which everyday Chinese fuel did Marco Polo describe as a marvel, because it was little known in his part of Europe?
Coal
Coal. Polo wrote of black stones dug from the mountains that burned like firewood, stayed alight until morning and cost less than wood.
Q 22What did Marco Polo's will grant Peter, a Tartar servant in his household, along with a gift of 100 lire?
His freedom
His freedom. The will releases Peter 'from all bondage', as completely, Polo adds, as he prays God will release his own soul from sin.
Q 23What became of Marco Polo's grave in Venice's church of San Lorenzo?
Lost without trace
His son. Persia's ruler Arghun had asked the Khan for a bride from his late wife's family; he died before she arrived, so Kököchin was married to Ghazan instead.
Q 14Marco Polo passed on sailors' tales of which giant bird, said to be strong enough to carry off an elephant?
The roc
The roc. Polo wrote that it dropped its prey from a height to smash it, and that men sent by the Khan came home with one of its giant feathers.
Q 15Marco Polo described the Great Khan's 'yamb', a chain of some 10,000 stations across the empire, which served as what?
Postal relay posts
Postal relay posts. Polo wrote that couriers found fresh horses waiting every 25 to 30 miles, so the Khan's orders crossed the empire far faster than any single rider could carry them.
Q 16Which rival republic was at war with the Polos' home city when Marco returned in 1295?
Genoa
Genoa. Polo is said to have joined the fighting in command of a war galley, and the two republics did not make peace until 1299.
Q 17Where was Marco Polo when he dictated his travels to the romance writer Rustichello?
In prison
In prison. Polo shared his captivity with Rustichello, a professional storyteller, who dressed the traveller's account in the style of a court romance.
Q 18In which language did Rustichello write down the original text of Marco Polo's book?
Franco-Venetian
Franco-Venetian, a literary French laced with Italian forms. French was the fashionable language of romance, and Rustichello had already written tales of chivalry in it.
Q 19Marco Polo's 'Cambaluc', the Great Khan's winter capital, stood on the site of which modern city?
Beijing
Beijing. Cambaluc is Polo's spelling of Khanbaliq, 'the Khan's city'; the court spent the cold months there and rode north to Shangdu for the summer.
Q 20Where is the children's call-and-response game Marco Polo, a form of tag, usually played?
In a swimming pool
In a swimming pool. It is blind man's buff played in water, and nobody has convincingly explained why its players shout the explorer's name.
Lost without trace. Polo's will asked for burial at San Lorenzo, but the old church was later pulled down and rebuilt, and neither his tomb nor his remains can be found today.
Q 24According to Jacopo d'Acqui, what did Marco Polo insist on his deathbed?
He had told only half of it
He had told only half of it. Friends at his bedside are said to have urged the dying man to take back the book's tall tales; he answered that he had left out half of what he saw.
Q 25Which fabric is usually said to take its name from a city in Iraq whose cloth merchants Marco Polo described?
Muslin
Muslin, which dictionaries trace to Mosul. Polo's 'mosolins' were rich cloths of silk and gold, though; only later did the word come to mean plain cotton.
Q 26What did the Great Khan give the Polos to guarantee them horses, lodging and escorts across his empire?
A tablet of gold
A tablet of gold. Such passes, called paizas, bore an inscription invoking the Khan's name and threatening anyone who failed to obey, so the Polos crossed Asia as his honoured guests.
Q 27In Marco Polo's telling, the Mongols starved Baghdad's last caliph by locking him up with only what?
His own treasure
His own treasure. In the story the Mongol prince Hulagu tells him to eat his gold, since he had loved it too much to spend it on soldiers to defend the city.
Q 28Which Chinese practice, a novelty to Europeans, did Marco Polo describe at length in his book?
Paper money
Paper money. Polo wrote that the Khan's notes were made from mulberry bark and stamped with his seal, and that nobody dared refuse them on pain of death.
Q 29Which famous structure did Marco Polo fail to mention, as 17th-century sceptics first noted?
The Great Wall of China
The Great Wall of China. The stone wall visitors walk today was built by the Ming dynasty, some two centuries after Polo left, and the Mongols had no use for a barrier against themselves.
Q 30Frances Wood of the British Library argued in a 1995 book that Marco Polo had never done what?
Reached China
Reached China. Wood argued that he got no further than Persia, or even the Black Sea, and pieced his account together from what Persian travellers and books told him.