reliable western map of Further Asia. His
personal knowledge did not reach China or India, but in his _Book of the
Tartars_, Europe was told nearly the whole truth, and almost nothing but
the truth, about the vast tract and the great races between the
Carpathians and the Gobi Desert. In the same was included the first fair
account of the manners and history of the "Mongols whom we call
Tartars," and the simple truthfulness of the Friar stands out in all the
allusions that make his work so human;--his interviews with the Tartar
Chiefs and with brother-travellers, his dangers and difficulties from
Lettish robbers and abandoned or guarded ferries, his passage of the
Dnieper on the ice, his last three weeks on "trotting"[24] hacks over
the steppes.

[Footnote 24: "_Tartari fecerunt equos nostros trotare._"]

We have gone a good way from Abbot Daniel, for in John de Plano Carpini
Christian Europe has at last a real explorer, a real historian, a
genuine man of science, in the service of the Church and of discovery.

Carpini was followed after six years by William de Rubruquis, a Fleming
sent by St. Louis of France on the same errand of conversion and
discovery (1253), but by a different route, through the Black Sea, and
Cherson, over the Don "at the Head of Azov, that divides Europe and
Asia, as the Nile divides Asia and Africa," to the great camp on the
Volga, "the greatest river I had ever seen, which comes from Great
Bulgaria in the north and falls into a lake (the Caspian Sea), that
would take four months to journey round." Higher in their course the Don
and the Volga "are not more than ten days' journey apart, but diverge as
they run south." The Caspian is "made out of the Volga and the rivers
that flow into it from Persia." Thence through the Iron Gates of
Derbend, between the Caspian and the Caucasus, "which Alexander made to
shut the barbarians out of Persia." Helped by a Nestorian, who possessed
influence at the Tartar Court, like so many of his Church, Rubruquis
reached the "Alps" of the Altai country, where he found a small
Nestorian lordship, governed like the Papal States, by a priest, who was
at least one original of the great mediaeval phantom--Prester John.

Crossing the great steppes of eastern "Tartary," "like the rolling sea
to look at," Rubruquis at last reached the Mongol headquarters at
Caracorum, satisfied on the way that the Caspian had no northern
outlet, as Strabo and Isidore had imagined. Thence