While there's already an answered question here about Marco Polo and fireworks, he is often credited with being the first Western record of many other innovations. One website, for example, credits him with "porcelain, coal, gunpowder, printing, paper money, and silk." I have not had the opportunity to fully go through Marco Polo's accounts, but some preliminary searching has left me feeling confused. To use coal as an example, there are accounts of coal being used in Europe before Marco Polo came back from his journey - although it only became widely used many centuries later, it was still present.
In short, how many of Marco Polo's accounts are actually apocryphal?
