<;I:<H;RAPHICAL SCIENCE. 283 



honi)iir, when the Crusades were taking so many people to the East, and when 

 the deu'lctpment of classical .study, favoured liy the ardour of the students 

 who flocked to the schools of the Paris University, fostered a taste for 

 encyclopaedias edited upon the same plan as Pliny's "Natural History." 

 Geography was destined to occupy a permanent place in these vast compila- 

 tions, and Vincent of Bea'uvais, who, by order of St. Louis, had intended to 

 present, in a voluminous compilation entitled "Speculum Majus," the com- 

 pendium of the scientific, historical, and philosophical information of his 

 time, instead of merely putting together all the documents and systems which 

 antiquity furnished him with concerning the history of geography and the 

 description of the universe, sought out the travellers who had visited the 

 countries which he intended to describe, and so obtained fresh information, 

 which, unfortunately, he failed to get revised by a competent critic. Never- 

 theless, his book is a valuable one, and he deserves great praise for his 

 " Speculum Naturale," in which he treats of the position of the skies, of 

 cosmography and geography, citing not more than a dozen Latin authors. 



From this period the accounts of travellers in Upper Asia enabled the 

 inhabitants of Europe to form more accurate and extensive notions con- 

 cerning this part of the world. The story of Prester John, alluded to 

 in the previous chapter, was the principal cause of these travels, and Pope 

 Innocent IV. and Louis IX. both determined to ascertain what truth there 

 was in these travellers' tales. The Pope accordingly sent two missions into 

 Asia; one confided to monks of the Franciscan order, the other to 

 Dominicans. The first proceeded to Mongolia, and the second to Persia 

 and Armenia. The story of the first mission was written by Brother John 

 dc Piano Carpini, who arrived with his companions upon the banks of the 

 Volga. The embassy sent to the Great Khan of Tartary by St. Louis a 

 few years later was of greater service to geographical science, and the 

 Flemish Franciscan monk, Ruysbroeck, generally called Rubruquis, gave 

 many interesting details in the account which he wrote as to distant countries 

 of which he could not ascertain even the name. Yet for another two 

 centuries the existence of Prester John was generally believed in. 



Another traveller, Marco Polo the Venetian, who, soon after Rubruquis 

 and John de Piano Carpini, went to seek his fortune in Tartary, and who 

 for twenty years held a high post at the court of the Great Khan, availed 

 himself of his residence and of his excursions in Asia to collect a mass of 



