dom.

[Illustration: THE SPANISH-ARABIC MAP OF 1109. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]

Abbot Daniel of Kiev in himself is a very ordinary and rather mendacious
traveller, a harmless, devout pilgrim, as careless in all matters of
fact as Antonine the Martyr. But, as representing the beginnings of
Russian expansion, he is of almost unique interest and value. His tract
upon the Holy Road is one of the first proofs of his people's interest
in the world beyond their steppes, and of that nation's readiness and
purpose to expand Christian civilisation in the East as the Franks,
after breaking through the Western Moslems, were now doing. Mediaeval
Russia, Russia before the Tartars, after the Northmen, was now a very
different thing from the "people fouler than dogs" of the Arab
explorers. The House of Ruric had guided and organised a nation second
to none in Europe, till it had fallen into the general lines of
Christian development. Jury trial and justices in assize it had taken
from the West; its church and faith and architecture, its manners and
morals came to it from the court of the Roman Empire on the Bosphorus.
Daniel and the other Russians, who passed through that Empire in the age
of Nestor for trade or for religion, were the vanguard of a great
national and race expansion that is now just beginning to "bestride the
world."

In 1022 and 1062 two monks of Kiev are recorded, out of a crowd of the
unknown, as visitors to Syria, and about 1106, probably through the news
of the Frankish conquest, Daniel left his native river, the Snow, in
Little Russia, and passed through Byzantium and by way of the
Archipelago and Cyprus to Jaffa and Jerusalem, describing roughly in
versts or half-miles the whole distance and that of every stage.

His tone is much like Saewulf's and his mistakes are quite as bad, though
he tells of "nothing but what was seen with these self-same eyes." The
"Sea of Sodom exhales a burning and fetid breath that lays waste all the
country, as with burning sulphur, for the torments of Hell lie under
it." This, however, he did not see; Saracen brigands prevented him, and
he learnt that "the very smell of the place would make one ill."

His measurements of distance are all his own. Capernaum is "in the
desert, not far from the Great Sea (Levant) and eight versts (four
miles) from Caesarea," half the distance given in the next chapter as
between Acre and Haifa, and less than half the breadth of the Sea of
Tiberias. The Jo