he world were: the voyages of the Vikings in the eighth and
ninth centuries, to which we have already referred; the Crusades,
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and the growth of the
Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The extra
knowledge obtained by the Vikings did not penetrate to the rest
of Europe; that brought by the Crusades, and their predecessors,
the many pilgrimages to the Holy Land, only restored to Western
Europe the knowledge already stored up in classical antiquity;
but the effect of the extension of the Mongol Empire was of more
wide-reaching importance, and resulted in the addition of knowledge
about Eastern Asia which was not possessed by the Romans, and has
only been surpassed in modern times during the present century.

Towards the beginning of the thirteenth century, Chinchiz Khan,
leader of a small Tatar tribe, conquered most of Central and Eastern
Asia, including China. Under his son, Okkodai, these Mongol Tatars
turned from China to the West, conquered Armenia, and one of the
Mongol generals, named Batu, ravaged South Russia and Poland, and
captured Buda-Pest, 1241. It seemed as if the prophesied end of
the world had come, and the mighty nations Gog and Magog had at
last burst forth to fulfil the prophetic words. But Okkodai died
suddenly, and these armies were recalled. Universal terror seized
Europe, and the Pope, as the head of Christendom, determined to send
ambassadors to the Great Khan, to ascertain his real intentions.
He sent a friar named John of Planocarpini, from Lyons, in 1245,
to the camp of Batu (on the Volga), who passed him on to the court
of the Great Khan at Karakorum, the capital of his empire, of which
only the slightest trace is now left on the left bank of the Orkhon,
some hundred miles south of Lake Baikal.

Here, for the first time, they heard of a kingdom on the east coast
of Asia which was not yet conquered by the Mongols, and which was
known by the name of Cathay. Fuller information was obtained by
another friar, named WILLIAM RUYSBROEK, or Rubruquis, a Fleming,
who also visited Karakorum as an ambassador from St. Louis, and got
back to Europe in 1255, and communicated some of his information to
Roger Bacon. He says: "These Cathayans are little fellows, speaking
much through the nose, and, as is general with all those Eastern
people, their eyes are very narrow.... The common money of Cathay
consists of pieces of cotton paper; about a palm in