250 COSMOS. 



great maritime nations of Italy — the Venet.ans and Genoese— 

 by his descriptions of the inexhaustible treasures of Eastern 

 Asia. He is acquainted with the *' silver walls and golden 

 towers" of Quinsay, the present Hangtscheufu, although he 

 does not mention the name of this great commercial mart, 

 which twenty-five years later acquired such celebrity from 

 Marco Polo, the greatest traveler of any age.* Truth and 

 naive error are singularly intermixed in the Journal of Rubru- 

 quis, which has been preserved to us by Roger Bacon. Near 

 Khatai, which is bounded by the Eastern Sea, he describes a 

 happy land, " where, on their arrival from other countries, all 

 men and women cease to grow old."t 



More credulous than the monk of Brabant, and therefore, 

 perhaps, far more generally read, was the English knight Sir 



Tana (Asof), CafFa, and the Erdil (the Volga), Alani and Gothic tribes 

 speakmg German. (Ramusiu, Delle Navigationi et Viaggi,\o\. ii., p. 

 92 b. and 98 a.) Roger Bacon merely terras Kubruquis trater Williel- 

 mus, quern dominus Rex Francifc misit ad Tartaros. 



* The great and admirable work of Marco Polo {II Milione di Messer 

 Marco Polo), as we possess it in the correct edition of Count Baldeili, 

 is inappropriately termed the narrative of " Travels.^' It is, for the 

 most part, a descriptive, one might say, a statistical work, in which it is 

 difficult to distinguish what the traveler had seen himself, and what he 

 had learned from others, and what he derived from topographical de- 

 scriptions, in which the Chinese literature is so rich, and which might 

 be accessible to him through his Persian interpreter. The striking 

 similarity presented by the narratives of the travels of Hiuan-thsung, 

 the Buddhistic pilgrim of the seventh century, to that which Marco 

 Polo found in 1277 (respecting the Pamir-Highland), early attracted my 

 svhole attention. Jacquet, who was unhappily too early removed by 

 a premature death from the investigation of Asiatic languages, and who, 

 like Klaproth and myself, was long occupied with the woz-k of the great 

 Venetian traveler, wrote to me as follows shortly before his decease 

 " I am as much struck as yourself by the composition of the Milione 

 It is undoubtedly founded on the direct and personal observation of the 

 traveler, but he probably also made use of documents either officially 

 or privately communicated to him. Many things appear to have been 

 borrowed from Chinese and Mongolian works, although it is difficult 

 to determine their precise influence on the composition of the Milione, 

 owing to the successive translations from which Polo took his extracts. 

 While our modern travelers are only too well pleased to occupy their 

 readers with their personal adventures, Marco Polo takes pains to blend 

 his own observations with the official data communicated to him, of 

 which, as governor of the city of Yangui, he was able to have a large 

 number." (See my Asia Centrale, t. ii., p. 395.) The compiling 

 method of the celebrated traveler likewise explains the possibility of 

 his being able to dictate his book at Genoa in 1295 to his fellow-prison- 

 er and friend, Messer Rustigielo of Pisa, as if the documents had been 

 lying before him. (Compare Marsden, Travels of Marco Polo, p. 

 xxxiii.) 



t Purchas, Pilgrims, Part iii., ch. 28 and 56 (p. 23 and 34). 



