COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

624 COSMOS.
Two centuries before the sources of Greek literature were
opened to the nations of the west, and twenty-five years before
the birth of Dante one of the greatest epochs in the history
of the civilization of Southern Europc,~-events occurred in the
interior of Asia as well as in the east of Africa, which, by ex-
tending commercial intercourse, accelerated the period
of the
circumnavigation of Africa and the expedition of Columbus.
The advance of the Moguls in twenty-six years from Pekin
and the Chinese wall, to Cracow and Liegnitz, terrified Christendom.
A number of able monks were sent forth as missionaries
and ambassadors : John de Piano Carpini and Nicholas
Ascelin to Batu Khan, and Ruisbrock (Rubruquis) to Mangu
Khan, at Karakorum. The last-named of these travelling missionaries
has left us many clear and important observations on
the distribution of languages and races of men in the middle
of the thirteenth century. He \vas the first who recognized
that the Huns, the Baschkirs (inhabitants of Paskatir, the
Baschgird of Ibn Fozlan), and the Hungarians,
were of Finnish
and he even found Gothic tribes who still re-
(Uralian) race ;
tained their language, in the strongholds of the Crimea.*
Rubruquis excited the eager cupidity of the great maritime
nations of Italy the Venetians and Genoese by his descriptions
of the inexhaustible treasures of Eastern Asia. He
is acquainted with the "silver walls and golden towers" of
Quinsay, the present llangtscheui'u, although he does not mention
the name of this great commercial mart, which twentyfive
years later acquired such celebrity from Marco Polo, the
greatest traveller of any age.f Truth and naive error are
burnt clay. This is the invention of Pi-scliing, but it was not brought
into application.
*
See the proofs in my Examen crit., t. ii. pp. 316-320. Josafat
Barbaro (1436), and Ghislin von Busbech (1555), still found, between
Tana (Asof), Cafia, and the Erdil (the Volga), Alani and Gothic tribes
speaking German. (Ramusio, Delle navigationi et viaggi, vol. ii. pp.
92b and 98a.) Roger Bacon merely terms Rubruquis frater Willielmus,
quern dominus Rex Francis misit ad Tartaros.
*f The grea tand admirable work of Marco Polo (II Milione dl Messer
Marco Polo), as we possess it in the correct edition of Count Baldelli,
is inappropriately termed the narrative of " Travels." It is for the most
part a descriptive, one might say, a statistical, work, in which it is difficult
to distinguish what the traveller had seen himself and what be had
learnt from others, and what ho derived from topographical descriptions,