ing traders, and the geographical knowledge
they circulated on their return gave a new impulse to the growing
spirit of adventure. Apocryphal as the narratives of Marco Polo and
Mandeville appeared, there was a sufficient mixture of truth with
exaggeration to stimulate the minds of men, ever greedy of gain, and
the endless wealth of the grand khan and his people were the subjects
of many eager and longing anticipations."[7]

The Polos were merely the forerunners, the pioneers, to the far
Cathay, and in the fourteenth century missionaries and merchants
followed on their trail with varying success. The death of Kublai Khan
had relieved them from their obligation to return; but soon after they
had reached Venice, in 1295, a Franciscan monk, John of Monte Corvino,
penetrated to Chambalu and established missions there. In the year
1338 an ambassador arrived at Avignon from the then reigning Khan of
Cathay, and in return John de Marignoli, a Florentine, was sent to the
court at Chambalu, where he remained four years as legate of the holy
see. Commercial travellers followed after them, and about 1340 a
guide-book was written by another Florentine, Francesco Pelotti, who
was a clerk in the great trading-house of Bardi, or Berardi, with
which, at a later date, Amerigo Vespucci was connected in Spain.

"When the throne of the degenerate descendants of Ghengis Khan began
to totter to its fall, missions and merchants alike disappeared from
the field. Islam, with all its jealousies and exclusiveness, had
recovered its grasp over Central Asia. Night again descended upon the
farther East, covering Cathay, with those cities of which the old
travellers had told such marvels, Chambalu and Cansay, Zaitun and
Chinkalan. And when the veil rose before the Portuguese and Spanish
explorers of the sixteenth century those names were heard of no
more....

"But for a long time all but a sagacious few continued to regard
Cathay as a region distinct from any of the new-found Indies; while
map-makers, well on into the seventeenth century, continued to
represent it as a great country lying entirely to the north of China
and stretching to the Arctic Sea. It was Cathay, with its outlying
island of Zipangu, that Columbus sought to reach by sailing westward,
penetrated as he was by his intense conviction of the smallness of the
earth and of the vast extension of Asia to the eastward. To the day of
his death he was full of the imagination of the proximi