One of the great travelers in world history, Marco Polo came from a merchant family in Venice with commercial interests and ties to the East and Central Asia.
The map below compares the routes of Marco Polo’s travels (shown in light blue lines) with that of two other nearly contemporaneous travelers, the Moroccan judge Ibn Battuta (shown in red lines) who also went to China, and the great 15th century Chinese Muslim Admiral Zhen Hui, (shown in yellow lines) whose massive commercial fleets roamed the Indian Ocean and made contact with the Red Sea and the African coastal port towns.
Patrick Kane
Muslim and Jewish Culture in the European-Latin Middle Ages 