Word: marco
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...richest empires are Ming dynasty China and the realm of the Ottomans, which blocks western Europe's old land routes to the east. Portugal and Spain seek oceanic alternatives; Lisbon rounds the Cape of Good Hope to reach India; Madrid crosses the Atlantic in hopes of landing in Marco Polo's Cathay but finds the Americas instead. Two continents are suddenly open to conquest...
...immense wealth of the Mongol empire and the suddenly free passage from west to east attracted merchants and adventurers, whose goods and tales would change the world. Marco Polo's stories became the dreams of Christopher Columbus. The quest for a passage to Cathay, the medieval name for northern China, would propel countless explorers through serendipitous discoveries in America. (In 1634, for example, the Frenchman Jean Nicolet left Quebec in search of China and discovered Green Bay, Wis.) Meanwhile, Franciscan missionary diplomats sent by the Pope to seek an alliance with the Khan against Islam brought back a black powder...
11th century San Marco, Venice. The Doge's chapel was modeled on a now destroyed church in the rival--and more splendid--metropolis Constantinople. But as it prospered, Venice both updated and preserved San Marco's splendor: five shallow Byzantine brick domes were covered over by metal ones. The 320-ft. campanile, foreground, raised in 912, collapsed in 1902. It was rebuilt in 1912--on its 1,000th birthday...
...Marco Polo described huge ships in Chinese seaports with separate watertight bulkheads. Without the compartments, ships with pierced hulls would sink. A half-century would pass before Western naval engineers adopted the technology...
...secret government warehouse. So proprietors aimed for the stratosphere and whiffed. Hotels supersized their room rates; tour operators assessed $1,000 cancellation fees; property owners in New York City and Miami put up their pads for sublet at five-figure rates (few takers, so far); British star chef Marco Pierre White tried and failed to auction off private parties at his restaurants at Sotheby's in London. Even in this boom time, the millennium is, like Yogi Berra's fabled night spot, so crowded nobody goes there...