M. Gregorieff appears to admit no alternative.  Yet it seems certain that the indications of Abulfeda, Pegolotti, and others, with regard to the position of the capital in the early part of the 14th century, are not consistent with a site so far from the Caspian.  Moreover, F. H. Mueller states that the site near Tzarev is known to the Tartars as the “Sarai of Janibek Khan” (1341-1357).  Now it is worthy of note that in the coinage of Janibek we repeatedly find as the place of mintage, New Sarai.  Arabshah in his History of Timur states that 63 years had elapsed from the foundation to the destruction of Sarai.  But it must have been at least 140 years since the foundation of Batu’s city.  Is it not possible, therefore, that both the sites which we have mentioned were successively occupied by the Mongol capital; that the original Sarai of Batu was at Selitrennoye Gorodok, and that the New Sarai of Janibek was established by him, or by his father Uzbeg in his latter days, on the upper Akhtuba?  Pegolotti having carried his merchant from Tana (Azov) to Gittarchan (Astrakhan), takes him one day by river to Sara, and from Sara to Saracanco, also by river, eight days more. (Cathay, p. 287.) In the work quoted I have taken Saracanco for Saraichik, on the Yaik.  But it was possibly the Upper or New Sarai on the Akhtuba.  Ibn Batuta, marching on the frozen river, reached Sarai in three days from Astrakhan.  This could not have been at Tzarev, 200 miles off.

In corroboration (quantum valeat) of my suggestion that there must have been two Sarais near the Volga, Professor Bruun of Odessa points to the fact that Fra Mauro’s map presents two cities of Sarai on the Akhtuba; only the Sarai of Janibeg is with him no longer New Sarai, but Great Sarai.

The use of the latter name suggests the possibility that in the Saracanco of Pegolotti the latter half of the name may be the Mongol Kunk “Great.” (See Pavet de Courteille, p. 439.)

Professor Bruun also draws attention to the impossibility of Ibn Batuta’s travelling from Astrakhan to Tzarev in three days, an argument which had already occurred to me and been inserted above.

[The Empire of Kipchak founded after the Mongol Conquest of 1224, included also parts of Siberia and Khwarizm; it survived nominally until 1502.—­H.  C.]

(Four Years of Archaeological Researches among the Ruins of Sarai [in Russian] by M. Gregorieff [who appears to have also published a pamphlet specially on the site, but this has not been available]; Historisch-geographische Darstellung des Stromsystems der Wolga, von Ferd.  Heinr.  Mueller, Berlin, 1839, 568-577; Ibn.  Bat. II. 447; Not. et Extraits, XIII. i. 286; Pallas, Voyages; Cathay, 231, etc.; Erdmann, Numi Asiatici, pp. 362 seqq.; Arabs. I. p. 381.)