he made his way home
without much fresh result.

[Illustration: THE PSALTER MAP OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. (SEE LIST
OF MAPS)]

Though Rubruquis is well called the most brilliant and literary of the
mediaeval travellers, his mission was fruitless, and the interest of his
work lay rather in recording custom and myth--in sociology--than in
adding anything definite to the geographical knowledge of the West. John
de Plano had already been over the ground to Caracorum, and recorded all
the main characteristics of the lands west of the Gobi Desert. The
further advance, east to China, south to India, was yet to come.

But while Rubruquis was still among the Tartars, Nicolo and Matteo Polo,
the uncles of the more famous Marco, were trading (1255-65) to the
Crimea and the districts of southern Russia that were now under the
Western Horde,--and soon after, following the caravans to Bokhara, they
were drawn on to the court of Kublai Khan, then somewhere near the wall
of China. After a most friendly reception they were sent back to Europe
with presents and a letter to Pope Clement IV., offering a welcome and
maintenance to Christian teachers. Kublai "had often questioned the
Polos of the Western lands," and now he asked for one hundred "Latins,
to shew him the Christian faith, for Christ he held to be the only God."
Furnished with the imperial passport of the Golden Tablet, our merchants
made their way back to Acre in April, 1269.

They found the old pope dead, Gregory X. in his place, and he shewed a
coolness in answering the Khan's requests, but in 1271 they set out on
their second journey to the furthest East, taking with them two friar
preachers and their nephew Marco, now nineteen years of age.

In Armenia the friars took alarm at the troubled state of the nearer
East and turned back, just as Augustine of Canterbury tried to find a
way out of the mission to the English that Pope Gregory I. laid upon him
in 597. For the Church it was perhaps as momentous a time now as then;
the thirteenth century, if it had ended in the Christianising of the
Mongol Empire, would have turned the Catholic victory of the fourth and
sixth centuries in the West, the victory that had been worked out in the
next seven hundred years to fuller and fuller realisation, into a world
empire,--which did come at last for European civilisation, but not for
Christendom.

The Polos however kept on their way north-east for more than "one
thousand days," th