st to describe China in its vastness, with its immense cities,
its manufactures and wealth, and to tell, whether from personal
experience or direct hearsay, of Thibet and Burmah, of Siam and Cochin
China, of the Indian archipelago, with its islands of spices, of Java
and Sumatra, and of the savages of Andaman. He knew of Japan and the
woful defeat of the Mongols there, when they tried to invade the island
kingdom in 1281. He gave a description of Hindustan far more complete
and characteristic than had ever before been published. From Arab
sailors, accustomed to the Indian ocean, he learned something about
Zanzibar and Madagascar and the semi-Christian kingdom of Abyssinia. To
the northward from Persia he described the country of the Golden Horde,
whose khans were then holding Russia in subjection; and he had gathered
some accurate information concerning Siberia as far as the country of
the Samoyeds, with their dog-sledges and polar bears.[332]

[Footnote 332: Yule's _Marco Polo_, vol. i. p. cxxxi.]

[Sidenote: Prester John.]

[Sidenote: The "Arimaspians."]

Here was altogether too much geographical knowledge for European
ignorance in those days to digest. While Marco's book attracted much
attention, its influence upon the progress of geography was slighter
than it would have been if addressed to a more enlightened public. Many
of its sober statements of fact were received with incredulity. Many of
the places described were indistinguishable, in European imagination,
from the general multitude of fictitious countries mentioned in
fairy-tales or in romances of chivalry. Perhaps no part of Marco's story
was so likely to interest his readers as his references to Prester John.
In the course of the twelfth century the notion had somehow gained
possession of the European mind that somewhere out in the dim vastness
of the Orient there dwelt a mighty Christian potentate, known as John
the Presbyter or "Prester."[333] At different times he was identified
with various known Asiatic sovereigns. Marco Polo identified him with
one Togrul Wang, who was overcome and slain by the mighty Jenghis; but
he would not stay dead, any more than the grewsome warlock in Russian
nursery lore. The notion of Prester John and his wealthy kingdom could
no more be expelled from the European mind in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries than the kindred notion of El Dorado in the
sixteenth. The position of this kingdom was shifted about her