The adventures of
Marco polo
Marco Polo was from Venice in Italy. His father Nicolo Polo was a trader and traveled a lot, just like his uncle Maffeo Polo. Marco himself also traveled a lot but the travels that his father and uncle made was not exiting enough for our Marco. He wrote about his travels in a journal and this way he helped Europeans learn about Asia, India and China. He was smart and learned necessary merchant skills such as foreign currency, appraisal, and the handling of cargo ships. His most famous journey began in Constantinople and conti-nued as far east as Pagan in southern Asia. When he re-turned to his home city of Venice he brought new knowledge and stuff with him, about gunpowder, pa-per and paper money, coal and tea making.
Sceptisism
He showed the paper money he brought back from Kublai Khan, but at first the people from Venice did not believe him and were sceptical about this way of con-ducting a payment. These sceptics burned a paper of money to show the vulnarabilty without rea-lizing that this paper was worth several peaces of gold. It cost Marco Polo much effort to convince the people to use the currency and to teach them about the practicality and efficiency of this method. He wrote: “All the people and regions of men who are under his rule gladly take these sheets in payment, because wherever they go they make all their payments with them both for goods and for pearls and for precious stones and for gold and for silver; they can buy everything with them, and they make payment with the sheets of which I have told you.” The main mecha-nism for trading was still only coins or trade in goods, which all had a real value in itself. The paper money was seemingly worthless and therefor difficult to under-stand when one did not see it in action.
Today
Nowadays we cannot even begin to imagine that we do not have paper money. Already for a very long time and actually across the whole world this type of money is accepted to be of real value and people may even think of money as being more valuable then property or other assets.
Marco Polo
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