with a long letter to the Kaan Quobley, as he is termed.  They never seem to have reached their destination.  And in 1289 Nicolas IV. entrusted a similar mission to Friar John of Monte Corvino, which eventually led to very tangible results.  Neither of the Papal letters, however, mentions Cathay. (See Mosheim, App. pp. 76 and 94.)

[5] See Muratori, IX. 583, seqq.; Bianconi, Mem.  I. p. 37.

[6] This Friar makes a strange hotch-potch of what he had read, e.g.: 
    “The Tartars, when they came out of the mountains, made them a king,
    viz., the son of Prester John, who is thus vulgarly termed Vetulus de
    la Montagna!” (Mon.  Hist.  Patr. Script.  III. 1557.)

[7] G. Villani died in the great plague of 1348.  But his book was begun
    soon after Marco’s was written, for he states that it was the sight of
    the memorials of greatness which he witnessed at Rome, during the
    Jubilee of 1300, that put it into his head to write the history of the
    rising glories of Florence, and that he began the work after his
    return home. (Bk.  VIII. ch. 36.)

[8] Book V. ch. 29.

[9] Petri Aponensis Medici ac Philosophi Celeberrimi, Conciliator,
    Venice, 1521, fol. 97.  Peter was born in 1250 at Abano, near Padua,
    and was Professor of Medicine at the University in the latter city. 
    He twice fell into the claws of the Unholy Office, and only escaped
    them by death in 1316.

[10] [It is curious that this figure is almost exactly that which among
    oriental carpets is called a “cloud.”  I have heard the term so applied
    by Vincent Robinson.  It often appears in old Persian carpets, and also
    in Chinese designs.  Mr. Purdon Clarke tells me it is called nebula
    in heraldry; it is also called in Chinese by a term signifying cloud;
    in Persian, by a term which he called silen-i-khitai, but of this I
    can make nothing.—­MS. Note by Yule.]

[11] The great Magellanic cloud?  In the account of Vincent Yanez Pinzon’s
    Voyage to the S.W. in 1499 as given in Ramusio (III. 15) after Pietro
    Martire d’Anghieria, it is said:—­“Taking the astrolabe in hand, and
    ascertaining the Antarctic Pole, they did not see any star like our
    Pole Star; but they related that they saw another manner of stars very
    different from ours, and which they could not clearly discern because
    of a certain dimness which diffused itself about those stars, and
    obstructed the view of them.”  Also the Kachh mariners told Lieutenant
    Leech that midway to Zanzibar there was a town (?) called Marethee,
    where the North Pole Star sinks below the horizon, and they steer by
    a fixed cloud in the heavens. (Bombay Govt.  Selections, No.  XV.  N.S.
    p. 215.)