of open-minded heathenism. They
were barbarians willing to learn. From end to end of Asia the barriers
were thrown down. It was a time when Alan chiefs from the Volga served
as police in Tunking, and Chinese physicians could be consulted at
Tabriz. For about a hundred years China was more accessible than at any
period before or since,--more even than to-day; and that country now for
the first time became really known to a few Europeans. In the northern
provinces of China, shortly before the Mongol deluge, there had reigned
a dynasty known as the _Khitai_, and hence China was (and still is)
commonly spoken of in central Asia as the country of the Khitai. When
this name reached European ears it became _Cathay_, the name by which
China was best known in Europe during the next four centuries.[325] In
1245, Friar John of Plano Carpini, a friend and disciple of St. Francis,
was sent by Pope Innocent IV. on a missionary errand to the Great Khan,
and visited him in his camp at Karakorum in the very depths of Mongolia.
In 1253 the king of France, St. Louis, sent another Franciscan monk,
Willem de Rubruquis, to Karakorum, on a mission of which the purpose is
now not clearly understood. Both these Franciscans were men of shrewd
and cultivated minds, especially Rubruquis, whose narrative, "in its
rich detail, its vivid pictures, its acuteness of observation and strong
good sense ... has few superiors in the whole library of travel."[326]
Neither Rubruquis nor Friar John visited China, but they fell in with
Chinese folk at Karakorum, and obtained information concerning the
geography of eastern Asia far more definite than had ever before been
possessed by Europeans. They both describe Cathay as bordering upon an
eastern ocean, and this piece of information constituted the first
important leap of geographical knowledge to the eastward since the days
of Ptolemy, who supposed that beyond the "Seres and Sinae" lay an unknown
land of vast extent, "full of reedy and impenetrable swamps."[327] The
information gathered by Rubruquis and Friar John indicated that there
was an end to the continent of Asia; that, not as a matter of vague
speculation, but of positive knowledge, Asia was bounded on the east,
just as Europe was bounded on the west, by an ocean.

[Footnote 325: Yule's _Cathay_, vol. i. p. cxvi.; _Marco Polo_,
vol. i. p. xlii.]

[Footnote 326: Yule's _Marco Polo_, vol. i. p. cxxx.; cf.
Humboldt,