Marco Polo

Marco?

Marco?!

Fig.1: "Okay, fine: POLO! What do you 
want from me?"

MARCO?! Oh, there you are. Sometimes I have trouble finding my audience for this blog. Thank goodness someone like Marco Polo (fig.1) once lived so we can annoy the crap out of people by repeating his name! Of course, the man had other achievements outside his delightfully rhyming moniker. For 24 years, this Venetian merchant traveled across Asia with this father and uncle, mostly under the employ of the famous Mongol ruler, Kublai Khan. While he was hardly the first European man to visit China, he achieved fame by describing his journey in his book commonly known as The Travels of Marco Polo, which was essentially one long Christmas letter bragging about his family vacation (everyone has that friend, don't they?). Though his outrageous stories were disputed even back then, many found the tales of mystical lands beyond their reach to be extremely fascinating, and might just have helped kick of the Age of Exploration that Europeans so love (and everyone else rues) to this day.

The Fourth Crusade

Fig.1: "Why did I come in here again?"

You know when you walk into a room and forget why you got up in the first place? So then you decide to smash the nice china cabinet with a baseball bat for no good reason? That's sort of like what the Fourth Crusade was like. Like the previous crusades, its propose was to make the pilgrimage to the Holy Land and wrest control of it from the Muslims. The Third Crusade did this pretty well, except that Christians failed to recover the super holy city of Jerusalem (having the Holy Land without Jerusalem was like eating fried chicken without the skin...or the guilt). Luckily for them, a Fourth Crusade was called in 1198 for this exact purpose. Unfortunately, it got a little distracted and spent all of its time attacking Christian cities, most notably the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. While the Catholics did manage to absorb territory that had been out of their fold for centuries, they essentially weakened the position of Christianity in Eastern Europe, and allowed Islam to dominate the region within the next two hundred years. But at least they got lots of loot out of it in the short run! (Sadly, the crusaders never took Macroeconomics 101.)