Italian explorer Marco Polo lived a truly adventurous life. His father and uncle traveled east just before his birth in 1254, and his mother tragically died when he was very young. His father Níccolo and uncle Maffeo didn’t return to Italy until Marco was 15 years old. They’d been tasked by the Mongolian khagan-emperor Kublai Khan with returning to China with lamp oil from Jerusalem and priests to act as ambassadors of Christianity in his kingdom. On their return, they took young Marco with them, giving him a crash course in the family business. According to National Geographic, the nearly four-year voyage was beset with hardships. In Afghanistan, on the route known today as the Silk Road, they were attacked by bandits. Then Marco came down with a severe illness that kept him bedridden for months before they could continue on.

But the party finally did reach its destination, and Marco Polo found that a whole new world was opening up to him. In his wildly popular “The Travels of Marco Polo” that he would go on to cowrite with romance author Rusticello da Pisa, Polo regaled his readers with tales of fantastic parties in Khan’s opulent palace at Xanadu attended by tens of thousands of revelers. He also received a once-in-a-lifetime job offer from the Mongolian emperor.

Marco Polo was given approval to travel the whole of Kublai Khan's empire

Print Collector/Getty Images