is from King Pul of Assyria"--in all this we
have as it were Catholic mythology turned inside out, David put into
Italy when the West put Trajan at the sources of the Nile. It was not
likely that writing of this sort would be read in the society of the
Popes and the Schoolmen, the friars and the crusaders, any more than the
Buddhist records of missionary travel from China one thousand years
before. The religious passion which had set the crusaders in motion,
would keep Catholics as long as it might from the Jews, Turks, infidels,
and heretics they conquered and among whom they settled.

But with the final loss of Jerusalem by the Latins, and the overthrow of
the Bagdad Caliphate by the Mongol Tartars (1258), the barrier of
fanatic hatred was weakened, and Central Asia became an attraction to
Christendom instead of a dim horror, without form and void, except for
Huns and Turks and demons. The Papal court sent mission after mission to
convert the Tartars, who were wavering, as men supposed, between Islam
and the Church, and with the first missionaries to the House of Ghenghiz
went the first Italian merchants who opened the court of the Great Khan
to Venice and to Genoa.

As early as 1243 an Englishman is noticed as living among the Western
Horde, the conquerors of Russia; but official intercourse begins in 1246
with John de Plano Carpini. This man, a Franciscan of Naples, started in
1245 as the Legate of Pope Innocent IV. to the Tartars, took the
northern overland route through Germany and Poland, reached Kiev, "the
metropolis of Russia," through help of the Duke of Cracow, and at last
appeared in the camp of Batou, on the Volga. Hence by the Sea of Aral,
"of moderate size with many islands," to the court of Batou's brother,
the Great Khan "Cuyuc" himself, where the Christian stranger found
himself one of a crowd of four thousand envoys from every part of Asia
(1246).

After sixteen months Carpini made his way back by the same route, "over
the plains" and through Kiev, to give at Rome the first genuine account
of Tartary, in its widest sense, from the Dnieper to China (1247).

The great rivers and lakes and mountains of Russia and Turkestan, the
position and distribution of the land and its peoples, "even from the
Caspian to the Northern Ocean, where men are said to have dogs' faces,"
are now first described by an honest and clear-headed and keen-eyed
observer, neither timid nor credulous.

Carpini really begins the