xhibit the vermilion impressions of those seals in Chinese
characters--perhaps affording the earliest specimen of that character
which reached western Europe.

Just as the Polos were reaching their native city (1295), after an
absence of a quarter of a century, the forerunner of a new series of
travellers was entering southern China by way of the Indian seas. This
was John of Monte Corvino, another Franciscan who, already some fifty
years of age, was plunging single-handed into that great ocean of
paganism to preach the gospel according to his lights. After years of
uphill and solitary toil converts began to multiply; coadjutors joined
him. The Papal See became cognizant of the harvest that was being reaped
in the far East. It made Friar John archbishop in Cambaluc (or Peking),
with patriarchal authority, and sent him batches of suffragan bishops
and preachers of his own order. The Roman Church spread; churches and
Minorite houses were established at Cambaluc, at Zayton or Tsuan-chow in
Fu-kien, at Yang-chow and elsewhere; and the missions flourished under
the smile of the great khan, as the Jesuit missions did for a time under
the Manchu emperors three centuries and a half later. Archbishop John
was followed to the grave, about 1328, by mourning multitudes of pagans
and Christians alike. Several of the bishops and friars who served under
him have left letters or other memoranda of their experience, e.g.
Andrew, bishop of Zayton, John of Cora, afterwards archbishop of
Sultania in Persia, and Odoric of Pordenone, whose fame as a pious
traveller won from the _vox populi_ at his funeral a beatification which
the church was fain to seal. The only ecclesiastical narrative regarding
Cathay, of which we are aware, subsequent to the time of Archbishop
John, is that which has been gathered from the recollections of Giovanni
de' Marignolli, a Florentine Franciscan, who was sent by Pope Benedict
XII. with a mission to the great khan, in return for one from that
potentate which arrived at Avignon from Cathay in 1338, and who spent
four years (1342-1346) at the court of Cambaluc as legate of the Holy
See. These recollections are found dispersed incoherently over a
chronicle of Bohemia which the traveller wrote by order of the emperor
Charles IV., whose chaplain he was after his return.

But intercourse during the period in question was not confined to
ecclesiastical channels. Commerce also grew up, and flourished for a
time even al