up to what was going on; he was created Archbishop in Cambalec (or Peking) with patriarchal authority, and was spasmodically reinforced with batches of suffragan bishops and friars of his order. The Roman Church spread; churches or Franciscan convents were established at Cambalec, at Kinsai (or Hangcheufu), then by general consent of Christian and Mahometan the vastest city in the world, at Zayton (or Chincheu), at Yangcheu, near the Great Kiang, and elsewhere; and the missions flourished under the immediate patronage of the Great Khan himFriar John, in the early and solitary days of his missions, followed a system which has sometimes been adopted by Protestant missions during famines in india. In his letter he says :

"I have bought gradually one hundred and fifty boys, the children of pagan parents, who had never learned any religion. These I have baptized, and taught Greek and Latin after our manner. Also, I have written out Psalters for them, with thirty Hymnaries and two Breviaries. By help of these, eleven of the boys already know our service, and form a choir, and take their weekly turn of duty, whether I am there or not. Many of the boys are also employed in writing out Psalters and other things suitable.

When

we are chanting, his Majesty the Cham can hear our voices in his chamber; and this wonderful fact is spread far and wide among the heathen...... And I have a place in the Cham's Court, and a regular entrance and seat assigned me as legate of our Lord the Pope, and the Cham honors me above all other prelates, whatever be their titles."

Among the friars who visited China during the interval between the beginning of the fourteenth century and the year 1328, when Archbishop John, full of years and honor, was followed to his tomb by a mourning multitude of Pagans as well as Christians, several have left letters or more extended accounts of their experience in Cathay. Among these was Friar Odoric, of Pordenone in Friuli, to whose work we shall recur by and by.

The Exchange had its envoys to China at this period as well as the Church. The record is a very fragmentary one; but many circumstances and incidental notices show how frequently both India and China were reached by European traders during the first half of the fourteeth century-a state of things very difficult to realize when we see how all the more easterly of those

regions, when reopened only two centuries later, seemed almost as absolutely new discoveries as the empire which about the same time Cortez and Pizarro were annexing in the west.

As examples of the frequency of mer cantile expeditions to India, we may quote the allusion of the Venetian Marino Sanuto writing about 1306, to the many merchants who had already gone to that country to make their purchases and come back safely. About 1322 Friar Jordanus, a Dominican, when in sore trouble at Tana (near Bombay), falls in with a young Genoese, who gives him aid; and the same Jordanus, writing at a later date from Gogo, in Guzerat, refers to information apparently received from Latin merchants on that coast. John Marignolli, when in Malabar who had been rescued from pirates in the about 1348, has for interpreter a youth Indian Sea by a merchant of Genoa. Mandeville speaks of the Italian merchants who frequented Hormuz. Again, as regards China and the remoter regions of Asia, John of Monte Corvino was accompanied all the way from Persia to Peking (129295) by Master Peter of Luculongo, "a faithful Christian man and a great merchant." There was then perhaps an intermission of some years; for Friar John, writing in 1305, says that twelve years had passed since he had heard any European news, except some in the shape of awful blasphemies about the Pope, which had been spread by a certain chirurgeon of Lombardy (probably a Paterino, or quasi-Protestant heretic) some two years before. A little latter in the century, however, Odoric refers for confirmation of the wonders he had to tell of Kansai (Hangcheufu) to the many persons he had met at Venice since his return, who had themselves been witnesses of the truth of his tales. A letter written in 1326 by Andrew Bishop, of Zayton (or Chincheu), quotes on a question of exchanges the opinion of the Genoese merchants at that great seaport. Some twenty years later John Marignolli found in the same city a fondaco, or factory and warehouse for the use of the Christian merchants; and about 1339 we find William of Modena, a merchant, dying with certain Franciscans, as a martyr to the faith, at Almalig, in the depths of Tartary.

But the most distinct and notable evidence of the importance and frequency of

this eastern trade is to be found in the work of Francis Balducci Pegolotti, a factor in the service of the great Florentine house of the Bardi (the house which gave a husband to Dante's Beatrice, and a heroine to George Eliot, in Romola), for whom he had acted not only in England and Flanders, but in Cyprus and the East. This book, which was written about 1340, under the name of Divisamenti di Paesi, or "Descriptions of Countries," is a regular hand-book of commerce, and the first two chapters of it are devoted to useful information for the merchant going to Cathay. The route lay from Tana or Azoy to Sarai, then a great city on the Wolga above Astracan, and thence by Astracan, Saraichik on the River Yaic or Ural, Organj near Khiva, Otrar near the Jaxartes, and Almalig near the River Ili, to Kancheu, in Northwestern China, and so forward to the Great Canal which led to the great marts of Peking and Hungcheu. Particulars are given as to the investments and exchanges proper to the journey, and especially as to the paper money, which forms the only currency of China; how the traveller was to dress and otherwise provide himself for the journey; what carriage he would require, and what his expenses ought to be. The road travelled from Tana to Cathay, the author says, was perfectly safe, whether by day or night, according to the report of the merchants who had used it. And the ventures were evidently no inconsiderable matters; for the example taken by the author to illustrate the question of exchanges is that of a merchant with dragoman and two men-servants, and goods to the value of 25,000 gold florins, or about £12,000 in intrinsic value.

This intercourse, both religious and commercial, probably continued till the fall of the Mongol dynasty in China (1368). The latest detailed notice of it which we possess is the account of the journey of John Marignolli, a Florentine friar, and afterwards Bishop of Bisignano, in Calabria, who was sent with some others in 1338 by Pope Benedict XII. on an embassy to the Court of Peking, in return for one which had come from the Emperor Togatimur, called by the Chinese Shunti, to the Papal Court at Avignon. The notices of this journey have been preserved for us in a manner sufficiently whimsical. Marignolli, after his return in 1353, seems

to have acquired the favor of the Emperor Charles IV., who was king of Bohemia. He made the traveller one of his chaplains, and carried him to Prague. During this visit the new chaplain was desired by his imperial patron to undertake the task of recasting the Annals of Bohemia. Charles would have shown a great deal more sense if he had directed the Churchman to put on paper the detailed narrative of his eastern experiences. However, let us be thankful for what we have. The essential part of the task was futterly repugnant to the Tuscan ecclesiastic. He drew back, as he says, from the thorny thickets and tangled brakes of the Bohemian chronicles, "from the labyrinthine jungle of strange names, the very utterance of which was an impossibility to his Florentine tongue." And so he consoled himself under the disagreeable task by interpolating his chronicle, à propos de bottes, with the recollections of his Asiatic travels, or with the notions they had given him of Asiatic geography. It might perhaps have been hard to drag these into a mere chronicle of Bohemia; but in those days every legitimate chronicle began from Adam at the very latest, and it would have been strange if this did not afford latitude for the introduction of any of Adam's posterity. And thus it is that we find these curious reminiscences imbedded in a totally unreadable chronicle of Bohemia, like unexpected fossils in a bank of mud. As these notices are little known, we propose to come back upon them more fully, and also upon the visit to China of the Moorish traveller Ibn Batuta, which took place about the time that Marignolli quitted Peking.

Soon after this time missions and merchants alike disappear from the field, as the Mongul dynasty totters and comes down. We hear, indeed, once and again, of friars and bishops despatched from Avignon ; but they go forth into the darkness, and are traced no more. For the now rulers of China revert to the old indigenous policy, and hold foreigners aloof, whilst Islam has recovered and extended its grasp over Central Asia; and the Nestorian Christianity, which once prevailed so widely there, is rapidly vanishing, leaving its traces only in some strange semblances of Church ritual which are found woven into the worship of the Tibetan Lamas, like the cabin-gildings and mirrors.

Cathay he was sent to seek was no other than China, but his endeavors to communicate with his brethren at Peking were long unsuccessful. At last they succeeded a native convert was sent to help him forward, and arrived at Kancheu only to find Benedict on his death bed. "Seeking Cathay, he found heaven," as one of his order has pronounced his epitaph. With him the curtain may finally drop upon Cathay. China alone could be recognized thenceforward by reasonable people, though for nearly a century later geographical works of some pretension continued to indicate Cathay as a distinct region, with Cambalu for its capital.

After this sketch of one phase of the communication between China and the Western World, we return to speak more particularly of some of the travellers who have been named.

First, then, of Friar Odoric. Born, about 1280, of a Bohemian family settled in Friuli, he joined the Franciscans at an early age, and about 1316, impelled, it would seem, by a natural love of roaming, rather than by the missionary zeal afterwards ascribed to him, he obtained the permission of his superiors to set out for the East. We have not space to trace his overland journey to the Persian Gulf, but thence he embarked at Hormuz for Tana, on the Island of Salsette, a port which may be considered the mediaval representative of Bombay, and now a station on the Great Peninsular Railway, a few miles from the modern city. Here four brethren of his order had recently met with martyrdom at the hands of the Mussulman governor of the city, which seems to have been then dependent on Delhi. Several chapters are devoted to the marvellous and very curious history of this event; and Odoric made it his business to take up the bones of his murdered comrades, and to carry them with him on his further voyage. He went on by sea to Malabar, and thence to Ceylon and Mabar, as the southern part of the Coromandel coast was then called by the Mahometan navigators, and to Mailapur, a town close to the modern Madras, and the name of which still adheres to suburb of that city, famous from an early date as the alleged burial-place of St. Thomas the Apostle, and visited as such by the envoys whom our own King Alfred sent to India.

a

Hence Odoric sailed to Sumatra, a name which he, perhaps, first brought to Europe, though it then applied to only a principality in the great island which now bears the title. He tells strange stories of the cannibalism for which certain tribes of that island have continued down to Our own day to be infamous. As Hakluyt's quaint old version of the traveller's story runs: "Man's Flesh, if it be fat, is eaten as ordinarily there as Beefe in our country. Marchants comming vn

to this Region for traffique do usually bring to them fat men, selling them vnto the Inhabitants as wee sel Hogs, who immediately kil and eate them!" Thence he went on to Java, apparently to Borneo, to Champa, or Southern Cochin China, and so to Canton. From Canton he travelled to two of the great ports of Fokien-viz., Zayton (or Chincheu) and Fucheu. At the former he found two houses of his order, and deposited with them the bones of his brethren, which he had carried thus far, and probably found. somewhat inconvenient baggage for a land journey. From Fucheu he crossed the mountains to the great city of which we have already heard, Kinsai or Kansa (a corruption of the Chinese king-szé, or "capital"). Thence he visited Nanking, and crossed the mighty Kiang, which he describes, justly, as the greatest river in the (non-American) world, under the Mongol appellation of Talai, or "The Sea." At Yangcheufeu, where he found three Nestorian churches, he embarked on the Great Canal, and proceeded by it to Cambalec (or Peking), where he abode for three years, attached, no doubt, to one of the churches founded there by Archbishop John, now in extreme old age. Turning homeward, at length, he went to Singanfu, in Shensi, for many years the capital of great Chinese dynasties-now the headquarters of one of the great insurrections (in this case Mahometan) which are tearing the Chinese Empire to pieces. Thence he found his way to Tibet, and its capital, Lhassa, the seat, as he says, of" the Pope of the Idolaters." Here we lose all precise indication of his further route, only we gather from slight hints and probabilities that his further journey led him through Badcokhshan and the passes of the Hindu Kush to Kabul, and thence by the south of the Caspian to the shores of the Mediter

The companion of Odoric; on part, at least, of these long wanderings, was Friar James, an Irishman, as appears from the record of a donation to him in the public books of Udine. It was in May, 1330, whilst lying ill in the Convent of St. Anthony, at Padua, that Odoric dictated his story, which was taken down in homely Latin by a brother-monk, and in January of the following year he died at Udine, in his native province. We cannot here relate the curious circumstances that attended the funeral, which ended in the declaration of his miraculous sanctity. Qui peregrinatur raro sanctificantur, says an ecclesiastical adage, and there is certainly nothing in Odoric's story to suggest his possession of exceptional holiness. The movement seems to have been in the first place entirely a popular one, and to have taken his brother-friars quite by surprise. They, probably, during his short residence among them since his return, had regarded him only as an eccentric, much addicted to drawing the long-bow about the Grand Cham and the Cannibal Islands! Be that as it may, Odoric was beatified by popular acclamation, the miracles performed by his remains were authenticated by a solemn commission,* and ever since he has been regarded at Udine as a sort of patron saint. He has never reached the higher honors of canonization, but in the middle of the last century the cult rendered to him for centuries received the solemn sanction of the Pope. We have seen the record of the process which then took place at Rome, a highly curious ecclesiastical blue-book of a hundred and fifty folio pages. The body of the beatified friar still lies at Udine, and is exhibited quadrennially to the eyes of the faithful, or so much of it as has not been frittered away in relics. These were in high esteem in the last century, and Father Ven

* Seventy such miracles are alleged to have been authenticated; and indeed so says the heading of the Notary's Report of the Commission; though (like the cotton reels of Manchester, which profess to contain two hundred yards of thread) as a matter of fact it enumerates only twenty-seven. The scribe at the end apologizes

"I have written them down as well as I could ... but not the whole of them, because there was no end to them, and I found it too difficult "in fact, "what no fellow could do!"

in his day the Polvere del Beato Odorico was reckoned potent in fevers, like the James's powders of our youth. We have not seen the body of this eminently wan dering Christian, but we have visited his tomb, and the cottage where he was born, near Pordenone.

Odoric has been scouted as a liar, and even the brethren who wrote his history as one of the saints of their order have been unable to hide their doubts. One says that much in the book will seem incredi .ble unless the holy character of the narrator find belief or force it--fidem extruat vel extorqueat. Another is reduced to plead character-so saintly a man would never have told lies, much less have sworn to them as Odoric has done!

There is no doubt, however, that he was a genuine, though undiscriminating, traveller. We cannot enter into all the proofs of this, but we may select a few passages in illustration of the manner of the story, and to show the justification that it admits of. We must not forget the disadvantage under which the story labors in having been dictated, and that in illness, and to a friar of probably still less literature then himself.

This may help to explain some of his most staggering stories. For instance, the narrative alleges that Odoric saw in Champa a tortoise as big as the dome of St. Anthony's at Padua. Now, the smallest of St. Anthony's many domes is some forty feet in diameter. But consider that the traveller was lying ill in that convent when he dictated the story to Brother William of Solagna. He tells the latter, perhaps, that he saw an awfully big tortoise. "How big?" quoth Guglielmo, all agape. big as the dome yonder ?" says the sick traveller, without turning his weary bones to look, "I dare say it might be!" And so down it goes in regular narration-" And I saw in that country a tortoise that was bigger in compass than the dome of St. Anthony's Church in Padua."

"Was it as "Well, yes,"

Now for a few specimens of his narrative. In describing a great idol on the Coromandel coast, he speaks of the various penances performed by the pilgrims who came from great distances to say their prayers before it, just, he remarks, as Christian folk go on pilgrimage to St. Peter's, and then he proceeds :