chap. i. How
richly suggestive to an American is the contemporaneity of
Rubruquis and Earl Simon of Leicester!]

[Footnote 329: Roger Bacon, _Opus Majus_, ed. Jebb, London,
1733, p. 183.]

[Sidenote: The Polo brothers.]

[Sidenote: Kublai Khan's message to the Pope.]

In the middle of the thirteenth century, some members of the Polo
family, one of the aristocratic families of Venice, had a commercial
house at Constantinople. Thence, in 1260, the brothers Nicolo and Maffeo
Polo started on a trading journey to the Crimea, whence one opportunity
after another for making money and gratifying their curiosity with new
sights led them northward and eastward to the Volga, thence into
Bokhara, and so on until they reached the court of the Great Khan, in
one of the northwestern provinces of Cathay. The reigning sovereign was
the famous Kublai Khan, grandson of the all-conquering Jenghis. Kublai
was an able and benevolent despot, earnest in the wish to improve the
condition of his Mongol kinsmen. He had never before met European
gentlemen, and was charmed with the cultivated and polished Venetians.
He seemed quite ready to enlist the Roman Church in aid of his
civilizing schemes, and entrusted the Polos with a message to the Pope,
asking him for a hundred missionary teachers. The brothers reached
Venice in 1269, and found that Pope Clement IV. was dead and there was
an interregnum. After two years Gregory X. was elected and received the
Khan's message, but could furnish only a couple of Dominican friars, and
these men were seized with the dread not uncommonly felt for
"Tartareans," and at the last moment refused to go. Nicolo and his
brother then set out in the autumn of 1271 to return to China, taking
with them Nicolo's son Marco, a lad of seventeen years. From Acre they
went by way of Bagdad to Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian gulf,
apparently with the intention of proceeding thence by sea, but for some
reason changed their course, and travelled through Kerman, Khorassan,
and Balkh, to Kashgar, and thence by way of Yarkand and Khotan, and
across the desert of Gobi into northwestern China, where they arrived in
the summer of 1275, and found the Khan at Kaipingfu, not far from the
northern end of the Great Wall.

[Sidenote: Marco Polo and his travels in Asia.]

[Sidenote: First recorded voyage of Europeans around the Indo-Chinese
peninsula, 1292-94.]

[Sidenote: Return of the Polos