s they were, ended in unrelieved collapse; only by
the revolt and resurrection of the Russian kingdom did the European
world permanently and markedly expand on the side of Asia. But a crowd
of missionaries followed the first traders to Cathay and to Mangi--Friar
Odoric, John de Monte Corvino, John de Cora; statesmen like Marignolli
the Papal Legate, sight-seers like Mandeville followed these; Bishop
Jordanus of Capua worked for years in Coulam near Cape Comorin (_c._
1325-35); the martyrdom of four friars on April 1, 1322, at Tana, in
India, became one of the great commemorations of the Latin Church; there
seemed no cause why Christian missions which had won north and
north-east Europe should not win central and eastern Asia, whose peoples
seemed as indifferent, as agnostic, as our own Norse or English pagans.

"The fame of the Latins," says Jordanus, about 1330--and he is borne out
by Marino Sanuto--"is greater in India than among ourselves. Here our
arrival is always looked for, and said to be predicted in their books.
Once gain Egypt and launch a fleet even of two galleys on this sea and
the battle is won." As Egypt could not be gained by arms, it was turned
by seamanship. Before Polo returned from China, the coasting of Africa
had begun, and Italian mariners were already in search of the longer way
to the East.

But there is no work of land travel after that of Messer Marco which
really adds anything decisive to European knowledge before the fifteenth
century; the advance of trade intercourse between India and the Italian
Republics, the gradual liberation of Russia the use made of the caravan
routes by some of the most active of the Western clergy, are the chief
notes of the time between the Polos and Prince Henry; and the flimsy
fabrications of Mandeville--"of all liars that type of the first
magnitude"--would be fairly left without a word even in a minute history
of discovery, if he had not, like Ktesias with Herodotus, won a hearing
for himself and drawn men's minds away from the truth-telling original
that he travestied, by the sheer force of impudence.

The Indian travels of the Italian Nicolo Conti and the Russian merchant
Athanasius Nikitin belong to a later time, to the age of the Portuguese
voyages; they are not part of the preparation for our central subject,
they are only a somewhat obscure parallel to that subject.

For in the later Middle Ages the chief interest lies elsewhere. The
expansion of Chris